In the 12 years that she has been working as a professional actress since, just out of the conservatory, she debuted with a small role in the Australian film A Death Wedding, many surprising things have happened to the very tall Elizabeth Debicki – she is 1.90 meters tall. It’s not easy to get over something like legendary director Baz Luhrman giving you a job in The Great Gatsby alongside Leonardo DiCaprio.
However, this actress born in Paris, daughter of a Polish man and an Australian, says without hesitation that the experience of playing Princess Diana in The Crown has been incomparable: “Playing someone like that was something truly beautiful. It’s something I’m going to miss,” she says in a press conference organized by Netflix. And she adds: “Diana has taught me a lot as a human being. The way she lived her life had to do with an ethic of love. It was something that illuminated her. She loved people and it was genuine, she had no expectations or hidden plans.”
Debicki joined the fifth season of the series created by Peter Morgan, replacing Emma Corrin. In the first four episodes, Elizabeth must face a new challenge, that of showing Diana’s last months. “Filming the sixth season was a very different process for me compared to the fifth,” says the actress and elaborates: “In my first episodes in the series it was a cerebral experience. There was an accumulation of all the research I did during the previous year and when I started filming I had to put all the pieces together and at the same time be sure of what I was doing. But when we were going to start filming season six, I thought I’d try something different. I decided to trust myself and let myself go. My gut told me that everything I had learned was still there and had deepened. “I realized that I didn’t need to think so much, that I could just be Diana.”
Judging by the results, the method worked: “On the first day of filming the new season, we did the scene where I wake up my children. And it was one of the strangest experiences I had as an actress, because as soon as they said ‘action’, she was there. As soon as I found out that this was the case, I simply surrendered. That gave me a lot of freedom to interpret it,” she confesses.
In the same way that for the fifth season he read everything he could find about Diana and spoke to many people who had known her, to try to understand what it was like to be in her shoes in those dramatic months of 1997 he just had to examine other types of material. : “As they were being chased by the paparazzi, there was a lot of footage. It helped me to see their body language. It was very unusual to have a tool like that. One can see the intimacy there was between them, despite all the pressure they were dealing with. You can see a great connection and a lot of sweetness,” she says.
Debicki, who is now 33 years old, three years younger than Diana was when she died, says that her tragic death is a reminder of how dangerous fame can be: “What happened to Diana is a cautionary tale, but the most extreme and tragic version that you can imagine,” he summarizes, and then theorizes: “Celebrity is a strange concept, because it becomes a palpable reality that can be horrendous for certain people. Fame is something that is not well understood, because from the outside it can seem attractive, since it opens doors. It’s something we think we want. But the most precious thing in life is your privacy, to be able to love those you want without having witnesses.”
Although she is 11 centimeters taller than Diana, and not so physically similar, Debicki admits that her connection with her has been particularly strong: “I still haven’t been able to leave the role. I feel like she’s still in my body. I guess when the world sees my work it will be easier for me to let it go. It was a very visceral performance and, thinking about it, I’m not sure she wants to let him go either,” she reveals.
