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- Elizabeth Debicki On Playing Princess Diana In The Crown
- Did Elizabeth Debicki Base Her Diana Performance On Other Movies?
Nearly everything about The Crown is polarizing. While the Netflix series is critically acclaimed and has a humungous fanbase, it’s also garnered its fair share of anger. For a number of reasons, the current fifth season of the series has been the most controversial yet. Much of this has to do with the fact that it deals with fresher wounds in terms of the life and actions of the British royal family. This, of course, includes the tragic life of Princess Diana.
While Emma Corrin played Princess Diana in the 4th season of the show, Tenet star Elizabeth Debicki has taken on the role for the final two seasons of the series. Right from the start, historians and royalists have called Debicki’s take on Princess Diana “uncanny”. However, it’s also stirred up a lot of scandal.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Elizabeth Debicki revealed that she too believes her performance and the very depiction of Princess Diana in The Crown is “polarizing”. Still, she defended it. Here’s what she had to say…
Elizabeth Debicki On Playing Princess Diana In The Crown
When Elizabeth Debicki first auditioned for The Crown, it was for an entirely different part which she didn’t get. However, years later, she was asked back for the role of Princess Diana in the final two seasons of the Netflix series. When asked by The Hollywood Reporter if she had any worries about taking the role, Debicki responded that it was a “no-brainer”.
“The acting challenge of it alone is so great, but it’s such an excellent challenge. It’s such a true challenge,” Elizabeth Debicki explained to The Hollywood Reporter. “Like how do you do this? And how do you embody that? And to get close to such an incredible person and do an interpretation of them and the other layer of it is that I love the show.”
Given the material, The Crown gave Elizabeth Debicki incredibly rewarding challenges as an actor. However, being cast in the role also brought a lot of heat. And she knew that there would be a ton of expectations from the audience who loved or disliked the real-life Princess.
“[Playing the role of Princess Diana] required a kind of mental discipline, in the sense of, you have to course-correct your brain a lot,” Debicki explained to The Hollywood Reporter. “On the one hand, it’s sort of just like a role you’ve played before. Here’s the script, here are the scenes, here are your lines, this is your character’s name, this is what you do as an actor, you interpret that. But then, of course, there’s this enormous amount of information that people are bringing to the story: memory, lived memory, expectation, opinions, and you have to leave a space for that, for what the audience brings to it.”
Debicki went on to admit that playing somebody that so many people feel they know and love was incredibly “daunting”.
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“I think it came down to a point where you just sort of have to accept that that is what it is,” she explained. “You can’t make it go away. You can’t quiet it down. You really just have to be disciplined and just sort of stay in your story and stay in that interpretation, and trust the writing, really.”
On top of this, Elizabeth Debicki knew that playing Princess Diana would upset a lot of people. People who don’t think the character should be portrayed on-screen as well as people who are very particular about how she’s portrayed.
“Of course people have opinions and of course they have memories and of course, they have thoughts and feelings. And of course, it’s polarizing. And that is what it is, you know, it’s a massive conversation, totally expected,” Debicki said before stating that she does her best not to engage with the discussion because it distracts her from the job she was hired to do.
“But when I think about it, and when I have read little bits of it, you understand the scope of it,” she continued. “You understand the different opinions about it, but, of course, at the end of the day, it comes down to just sort of being an actor and playing a role as best you can. And being as honest as you can be while you’re doing it.”
Did Elizabeth Debicki Base Her Diana Performance On Other Movies?
Despite all of the heat on Elizabeth Debicki’s take on Princess Diana, there have been a number of other notable takes on the real-life person. Of course, The Crown itself has seen Emma Corrin in the role. During her interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Debicki explained that she had seen some of the portrayals of Princess Diana prior to playing her.
“I’d seen some of them. I think one of the things that’s lovely about The Crown is that because somebody’s played your part before you, it’s a kind of lovely leveler in a way,” Elizabeth Debicki said to The Hollywood Reporter. “I love it as a device too for the audience as a reminder that this is craft and it’s construction, and you can suspend disbelief. And that’s what we ask the audience to do when we turn over to a new cast.”
As for what she thought of some of the other takes on Princess Diana, in The Crown and not, Debicki said, “They’re all so different, and neither is right or wrong. And they’re all just an interpretation, and so I guess that’s probably where I put it in my brain.”
So, it seems that Elizabeth Debicki wanted to bring her own thing to the role. And despite seeing some of the other versions of Princess Diana, Debicki really didn’t know much about her before being cast. Much of her own research created the seasons 5 and 6 version of the character.
“Everything I was learning, I was really learning for the first time. I don’t think I understood the degree to which the media affected her life and the course of her life. Of course, I understood that she was this public figure, and she was unbelievably well-documented, and somebody who wasn’t left alone enough,” Debicki explained. “I didn’t know the degree of it really.”
