Variety’s Anatomy of A Character: ‘The Crown’ Creatives on Transforming Elizabeth Debicki for Princess Diana’s Final Days

“Diana was always going to be a massive deal,” casting director Robert Sterne said of the enormous task of working on “The Crown.“

When the Emmy-award-winning Netflix series about the modern-day British royal family was still in pre-production, there were two primary casting concerns. First, who was going to play the Queen? Over six seasons, Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton took on the role of Queen Elizabeth II at various stages of her life. The other casting challenge was how Princess Diana would be handled.

Sitting down for Variety’s Anatomy of a Character, Sterne said, “Everything was heading towards that character and that storyline.” The character would make her debut in season three, and it was no easy undertaking, but it needed to be someone who could play the young Lady Diana Spencer. Emma Corrin was cast in that role. The next stage of Diana was her later years, which meant finding someone to play a woman at the end of her marriage, someone in line with the iconic images taken by top photographer Mario Testino.

“There was one person who could do the job and there was one person on the list,” said Sterne.

That was Elizabeth Debicki. Fortunately, she said yes.

Debicki stepped into the role in season five. Diana goes through her separation, the fallout of her BBC One “Panorama” interview and her divorce from Prince Charles. It also leads to her meeting Dodi Al-Fayed, who invites her to spend a fateful summer with him on his yacht. Season six picks up just months after and follows her during in the last few weeks of her life.

“This is an absolute gift from the acting heavens,” Debicki said. “I was never, ever not going to play this part. A lot of people have said, ‘Did you have to think very hard?’ I don’t think I had a single thought in my head. It was only when I left the meeting and sort of got halfway down the block. I thought, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?'”

Debicki won rave reviews for her portrayal of Diana. She also won the hearts of voters as she scooped up a Golden Globe and SAG Award.

Despite knowing Diana’s fate, Debicki was still anticipating the scripts and how the story would unfold.

Said Debicki, “It was so beautiful to realize that I could trust that all the foundations I had laid in season five were there.”

When it came time to roll, Debicki said, “I hadn’t really run any lines. It’s almost like I hadn’t heard her for a few months…I stood there before someone said action. I thought, ‘I wonder where she is.’ And someone said, ‘action,’ and it just sprung out. It was all just there.”

Hair department head Cate Hall noted she didn’t have the license to make sweeping changes. However, she could have little moments to make a creative mark when Diana was in private.

But that didn’t come without its challenges. While there were scenes of Diana on vacation or with the boys, Hall played with the wig. “It was really difficult,” Hall admitted. “Trying to figure out if we change the parting if we make it a center parting, is it Diana-ish enough? But from what we can tell, it was a much more relaxed, undone hairdo.”

Musically, composer Martin Phipps talked about how there was a sonic shift this season, particularly with Diana. “We tried to use actually less and less music as the season went on and the series went on. Trying to do more with less was always the brief from (showrunner) Peter Morgan, and it’s hard to do and it’s a real challenge, but if you can put it off, it’s much more rewarding to have less music.”

Said Phipps, “We swerved scoring her directly. The story was so amazing and so powerful and so charged already that it didn’t need a score that was doing the same thing at all in earlier seasons. We had a really simple harp theme for her. Just very delicate and quite fragile.”

By season six, he reverted to the “classic Crown chords that just sat underneath these events as they were going and didn’t try and say too much or do too much.”

One particular moment that stands out is when Diana has a phone call with her sons Prince William (Ed McVey) and Harry (Fflyn Edwards). In the scene, they ask her if she’s going to marry Dodi (Khalid Abdalla), and a soft cue begins to play.

Said Phipps, “It’s an interesting cue because that’s a sort of theme that we don’t really use very much at all. It’s a very soft string theme. It’s quiet, not sentimental, but it’s very soft and emotional and it’s just one time where we allow that kind of raw emotion in the music.”

Debicki revealed that said scene was what she had been working toward. “I was so happy to be on the phone and I just love those boys. They’re amazing kids. They were so beautiful and sweet and loving,” she said.

The actress broke down the significance of that scene. She said, “I’d spent months shooting the episode trying to get to that phone call. So when I got to the chair and I could hear their voices on a little loop in a microphone in my ear, I was just so happy to hear them. And that’s really all that is. It’s the deepest and simplest thing of all. It’s just just loving your kids. And so that’s all I played…I felt like it was just important to give the audience that sort of purity.”

Sterne looked at hundreds of actors to cast the royal sons. He told Debicki, “It was just crucial that we had to get them right and we just really wanted you to feel you had your boys.”

Juxtaposing the private moments were the very public moments, images seared into the public’s mind, such as that of the Princess sitting on the edge of a diving boat aboard Dodi’s yacht in the Mediterranean Sea.

Hall said those were intimidating to recreate because the public images existed. But once the team had “found our way of presenting Diana in private on holiday, that moment wasn’t a struggle in the end. It’s this beautiful long shot of this woman. It was just that it was all there and we had found the character and I think in that moment you could really see that.”

The artisans also revealed it took approximately an hour and a half to transform Debicki from the wig application process to spray tanning her. Debicki noted it was important to get the silhouette correct and which was all created through the team in costume, hair and makeup. “Once you create that silhouette then it’s your responsibility and every department’s responsibility to upkeep it.

Following her death, the Princess still appears to certain characters in visions. She appears to The Queen and for that, Phipps wanted a classic piece of music that had been previously used. “It has voices in it, along with the harp that we associated with Diana, and it had a slight twinkle in its eye as well, which was lovely at that moment and heartbreaking.”

Watch the full video above.