The Crown’s Elizabeth Debicki speaks out for the first time about playing the ‘ghost’ of Princess Diana – and admits the scenes ‘hurt’

Actress Elizabeth Debicki – who plays Princess Diana in The Crown – has spoken for the first time about the experience of playing her as a ‘ghost’ who appears to both Prince Charles and the Queen.

Debicki, 33, describes the scenes between her and Dominic West, in which she plays Prince Charles, as “beautiful” and adds that it gives the late princess the chance to tell her estranged husband how much she loved him – which she said in real life didn’t get. .

She said, “We didn’t rehearse. I think we just rolled the camera and we were both very curious, I think, as actors, and I also remember feeling like, “This is going to hurt.” And that happened.

‘We just opened our hearts, because what Peter [Morgan] this is imagined. To me, it’s so beautiful because – and that’s also why it was so devastating to photograph.

“It’s so easy to understand what the Charles character is feeling because for anyone who has lost someone you know, the one thing you would do as soon as you lose them, and what you would give anything for, is to do it again to talk to him or her.

“So that makes me very emotional just thinking about it. But anyway, we photographed it and I also think the great thing is that it is an imagined Diana.

“And what he also gives her is the freedom to say the things she’s always wanted to say to him, which is… and we see that.

“We see that this hostility and the difficulty has been resolved, but finally there is a moment where she can just say, ‘I have loved you so much.’ I’m really happy to be able to say that in that character.”

The Australian actress, 33, said playing the ghost of Princess Diana had been ‘beautiful’ but it also ‘hurt’ (Image: Elizabeth Debicki at the premiere of The Crown season 6 part 1 at the Westwood Regency Village Theater in Los Angeles on November 12, 2023 )

In the show, which can be seen from November 16, the late princess has an emotional reconciliation with a grieving Prince Charles.

She tells him how “handsome” he is and reminds him how much she loved him as he cried with regret.

The imagined scene comes after Prince Charles is pictured sobbing over her body in a hospital morgue in Paris.

Diana tells him, “Thank you for how you were at the hospital. So raw, broken – and beautiful. I’ll take that with me.

“You know I loved you so much. So deep, so painful too. That’s over now. Now that I’m gone, it will be easier for everyone.’

Charles tells the dead Diana, “It was always like this. You were always the most loved of us all.”

He adds, “The only thought I’ve had since the moment I heard it is regret.” She tells him, “That will pass,” and he replies, “No, it won’t.”

Writer Peter Morgan has said that the Diana depicted in these scenes is not a ghost, but a visualization in the minds of her family.

When the ghost of Princess Diana appears to Prince Charles, she tells him how “handsome” he is and reminds him how much she loved him as he cried with regret. (Image: Actor Dominic West as Prince Charles talking to the ghost of Princess Diana)

Debicki said this week that she felt a “real fear” when opening the scripts for this latest series of the Netflix drama. “I knew how very, very sad it would be for me, on a human level, to tell that story and on an acting level. And of course also the idea of ​​saying goodbye to the characters, so I postponed reading the scripts as long as possible and one day I read them all in one go.’

She said that when researching the late princess, she was surprised by her playfulness and humor as well as the extent of her humanitarian work.

“I understood the basics, but I think the way Princess Diana used her platform, and it was so progressive at the time to stand up, and so courageous, I mean, the amount of vulnerability that she must have experienced in some way. of discussing mental health issues affecting her, knowing she could touch a huge audience of people who were affected by them.

‘We also have everything she did for AIDS and everything she did for landmines. I mean, what I also learned while researching season six was how little of the world’s attention was on that topic, and she absolutely grabbed that spotlight and just shone it on there. And she also put her body on the line, and it was just, I thought, remarkable, really incredible.”

She added, “The relationship she has with her children on this show is just the highlight. It is her center. They are her purpose, they are her whole heart, so I was lucky to have these wonderful children that I adored, and when I saw them last night I felt the same way.”

Meanwhile, actor Jonathan Pryce, who plays Prince Philip in the show, has for the first time expressed doubts about the portrayal of his friendship with Penny Romsey, his driving partner, in series five.

The actress said she felt “real fear” when opening scripts for the latest series of the Netflix drama

He said: ‘The biggest thing I learned about him that I didn’t know came from my first meeting with Peter Morgan, when he told me the direction he wanted to take Philip’s character in and that he wanted to expose this and talk about it. relationship he had with Penny Romsey.

‘I didn’t know anything about this relationship. And I left Peter’s house thinking, Do I want to be the guy who tells the world that Phillip has this friendship?

‘And I was very nervous about it and then I went to France and I thought, I’m going to Google it – and I put the two names into Google and the European Google was full – page after page after page – of stories about Philip and Penny and that gave me a lot of confidence to approach that storyline.

‘But it also told me how the British press was likely manipulated to suppress these stories. And that was very interesting to discover what power the royal family could have, and Philip in particular.’