The actress speaks with Shondaland about playing Princess Diana on this season of “The Crown,” her professional pedigree, and the moment she decided to be an actress.
You can’t take your eyes off Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana in this season — the fifth in the hit Netflix series — of The Crown. She practically channels the iconic royal’s reserve, lengthy elegance, and effortless grace, all while conveying the depths of the emotional pain Diana experienced, at times using only an artful turn of the neck and her huge blue eyes to show just how traumatic Princess Diana’s life as a Windsor truly was.
Debicki’s on-screen strength should come as no surprise. The daughter of a Polish father and an Australian mother of Irish descent who were both dancers in Paris, Debicki is a performer born to performers. The family moved to Melbourne when Debicki was young, and when asked when she first realized she might become an actor, she says her first inkling came after seeing Natalie Portman in the “incredible” Léon: The Professional.
“It was such a weird thing. I probably never should have even been watching that movie at that age, but I remember thinking, ‘Wow!’” Debicki tells Shondaland of the film, which sees the preteen Portman training to be an assassin after her entire family is brutally murdered. “For some reason, that really stuck in my head.” When she was in high school, Debicki studied dance and thought she might follow in her parents’ footsteps — or, in another pivot, become an archaeologist or teacher. But Debicki lucked out with a great drama teacher in high school who encouraged her to pursue her passion for acting. “He sort of said to me, ‘I really think you should try out for drama school,’” she says. “He helped me with my monologues. I’d never done a monologue before.”
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Debicki went on to graduate with a degree in drama from the University of Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts, earning recognition as an outstanding student in her second year. Almost immediately upon her graduation, director Baz Luhrmann — the visionary behind Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge — gave Debicki her big break, casting the virtual unknown in The Great Gatsby as the beguiling socialite Jordan Baker opposite Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway. Her star only ascended from there: She went on to star in the BBC spy thriller The Night Manager; co-star with Cate Blanchett in The Maids with the Sydney Theatre Company; join Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, and Cynthia Erivo in Steve McQueen’s Widows; appear alongside John David Washington and Robert Pattinson in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet; and make her mark in the MCU with her fierce yet darkly funny turn as galactic queen Ayesha in two of the Guardians of the Galaxy sequels.
When it comes to playing Princess Diana, a long line of impressive actresses, obviously, precedes Debicki: Naomi Watts, Kristen Stewart, Emma Corrin, Jeanna de Waal. And then there are the countless TV specials and documentaries that have attempted to capture the dramatic ins and outs of Diana’s life, both as a royal and pre or post palace life. But it was Debicki who “freaked out” Andrew Morton, the biographer who wrote the 1992 book Diana: Her True Story, with her portrayal of the Princess of Wales. “I mean, I don’t say this very often, but I was shaken,” he recently told Good Morning America. Yet more praise for her performance: The Daily Beast recently referred to Debicki as the “best Diana ever.”
Debicki says preparing for the role of Princess Diana was a “multistep process.” To begin, she told the research department at The Crown she wanted “everything” Diana. “I’ve never done anything like it before,” she says. “It’s sort of like two things are happening at once. One is a really technical kind of preparation, vocally and physically, and the other one is an absorption of footage and reading. That one’s sort of a little more vague, because you sort of glean what you glean. I think the thing as an actor that always fascinates me about what sticks — you don’t always know what’s going to stick, so you absorb as much as possible, and the bits that stick, stick.”
Dominic West as Prince Charles and Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana in season five of The Crown.
Netflix
Charged with preparing for the role during the height of the pandemic, Debicki says she had plenty of time to focus on the process of becoming Diana. “You can’t really rush it,” Debicki relates of the process. “I was really fortunate, I think, that I had that time because it was toward the end of 2020, and it was still lockdown, so I had time to think and read, and I wasn’t distracted. I wasn’t doing another job.”
As intuitive a casting decision as Debicki as Diana is, she initially auditioned for a smaller part on The Crown in season two. “I was in London doing a play, and my agent said, ‘They want to see you for this part,’ and I was sort of like, ‘What?’ because I was physically so wrong for it,” she explains. “But I was so enamored with the first season, I thought I’ll just go and do anything. They could’ve said, like, ‘We want you to play Elvis Presley,’ and I’d be like, ‘I’m in! I’ll do whatever!’ I did this terrible audition for that part, but somehow during the audition for that, they saw Diana. So, they kind of penciled it in, but then I officially got asked two years ago.”
Debicki is quick to name the challenges involved with becoming another person, let alone a cultural icon, on-screen. “I think the greatest challenge is kind of the stuff that comes before you do the acting — the psychological process of getting over those hurdles you have, and walls you’re building for yourself about what you’re capable of doing, and how close you’re going to be able to get to this person,” she explains of the pressure she put on herself to get Diana right. “There’s also a lot of noise that was probably really just coming from myself about the responsibility of it, how beloved this person is, and how do we funnel that into this role and feed this interpretation. It was a noisy period that culminated in many days where I would just sit up in bed and think, ‘I can’t do it. I don’t know what I’m doing.’ But that was really the hardest, grittiest part because after that, it really then just becomes what you do as an actor: This is the character; these are the lines.”
Left to right: Jonny Lee Miller, Elizabeth Debicki, Dominic West, Imelda Staunton, Jonathan Pryce, and Lesley Manville attend The Crown season five world premiere at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane on November 08, 2022 in London, England.
Samir Hussein//Getty Images
As for the physicality of conquering the role and that distinctive, artful turn of the neck, Debicki credits The Crown movement coach Polly Bennett for helping her capture the corporeal nuances of Diana. “I’d never had a movement coach before,” Debicki says. “What I loved about it was I had this captive person who had to have the conversation with me. If I wanted to talk about the tilt of her head for an hour, she had to do it,” she says with a chuckle. “You sit around doing it on your sofa and feel like you’re going mad. It’s interesting when you do these characters because what you want to be able to give the audience is the satisfaction of recognition, of something that is somehow enmeshed in our cultural consciousness: how these people sound, how they look, and how they occupy space. Working with Polly was fantastic because we all have a map, a blueprint in our body, and the way we move is a response to that. She kind of helped me understand the map. When you play Diana, everybody goes and does this thing with their neck” — Debicki demonstrates Diana’s distinctive neck turn and upward, doe-eyed stare. “Everybody does it. The burly painter that comes to your house … you’re like, ‘I’m playing Diana,’ and he goes,” she does the neck turn again. “Everybody does it.”
She also mentions how humor — both hers and Diana’s — was instrumental through the sadness of playing the role. “I used to joke all the time after doing some terribly sad crying scene. I’d say, ‘They’re trying to turn The Crown into a comedy, one scene at a time,’” Debicki jokes. “‘Can’t she have the hiccups in this scene or anything?’ When I started to do research, strangely, I realized I knew quite a lot of people who had been close to her. The thing I always heard people say — and I almost felt it was vital to the people who knew her to get across — was, yes, she had an incredibly tragic life in so many ways, but her vitality, and her humor, and her joy were so, so vivid. As soon as people start talking about her, you’d hear, ‘I was doing this speech, and I got up, and she was sitting next to me the entire time; she was pinching my bum. She thought that was glorious.’ I love that person. It was really important to me to thread that through.”