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

• Actress Elizabeth Debicki breaks down the emotional scenes for the first time
• READ MORE: First look at Netflix hit series The Crown season 6

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, playing 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 did not get in real life.

She said: ‘We didn’t do any rehearsal. I think we just rolled the camera and that we were both very curious, I think, as actors and also I remember feeling like, “This is going to hurt”. And it did.

‘We kind of just opened our hearts up because what Peter [Morgan] imagines is this. To me it’s so beautiful because – and it’s also why it was so devastating to shoot.

‘It’s so easy to understand what the Charles character is feeling because for anyone who’s lost anyone you know, the second you lose them, the only thing you would do – you would give anything for – is to talk to them one more time.

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’ (Pictured: Elizabeth Debicki appears as Princess Diana’s ghost to The Queen – played by actress Imelda Staunton)

‘So that makes me very emotional, just thinking about it. But anyway, we shot it and also I think what’s beautiful is that it’s an imagined Diana.

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

‘We see this hostility and the difficulty ended up but finally there’s this moment where she just is able to say: “I have loved you so much”. I’m really glad that I got to say that in that character.’

The Australian actress, 33, said playing Princess Diana’s ghost had been ‘beautiful’, but it also ‘hurt’ (Pictured: Elizabeth Debicki at The Crown Season 6 Part 1 premiere held at Westwood Regency Village Theatre in Los Angeles on November 12, 2023)

In the show, which streams from November 16th, 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 weeps with regret.

The imagined scene comes after Prince Charles has been depicted sobbing over her body in a hospital morgue in Paris.

Diana tells him: ‘Thank you for how you were in the hospital. So raw, broken – and handsome. I’ll take that with me.

‘You know I loved you so much. So deeply, so painfully too. That’s over now. It will be easier for everyone with me gone.’

Charles tells the dead Diana: ‘It was ever thus. You were always the most beloved of all of us.’

He adds: ‘The only thought I’ve had since the moment I heard 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 visualisation in the minds of her family.

When Princess Diana’s ghost appears to Prince Charles, she tells him how ‘handsome’ he is and reminds him how much she loved him as he weeps with regret. (Pictured: Actor Dominic West as Prince Charles speaking with Princess Diana’s ghost)

Debicki said this week that she felt a ‘real anxiety’ when opening the scripts for this final series of the Netflix drama. ’I knew how very, very sad it was going to be for me on a human level to tell that story and on an acting level. And also of course, the idea of sort of saying goodbye to the characters so I put off reading the scripts for as long as I could and then I did read them one day and I read them all in one go.’

She said that researching the late Princess she had been surprised by her playfulness and humour and also by the extent of her humanitarian work.

‘I understood the kind of basics, but I think the way that Princess Diana used her platform, and it was so progressive at the time to stand up, and so brave, I mean, the amount of vulnerability that she must have experienced in sort of discussing mental health issues that pertain to her knowing that she could sort of touch an enormous audience of people who were experiencing.

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

She added: ‘The relationship she has with her children in this show is just the pinnacle. It’s her centre. It’s her purpose, they’re her whole heart so and I was just lucky that I had these miraculous kids who I just adored being around and last night when I saw them I felt the same way.’

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

The actress said she felt a ‘real anxiety’ when opening the scripts for the final series of the Netflix dramae 

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

‘I knew nothing about this relationship. And I left Peter’s house thinking, do I want to be the man 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’ll Google it – and I put the two names into Google and 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 about how the British press were presumably manipulated into suppressing these stories. And that was a very interesting thing to discover how the power that the royal family might have, and Philip especially.’

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