In November of 1995, journalist Martin Bashir’s bombshell interview with Princess Diana aired as part of Panorama on BBC1. And in November of 2022, The Crown’s reimagining of this interview dropped on Netflix.
The content of “An Interview with H.R.H. the Princess of Wales” shocks the world — not to mention the royals themselves — in Season 5 of The Crown, but the way the Panorama interview comes together is just as shocking as the cutting remark that “there were three of us in this marriage.” As Bashir (Prasanna Puwanarajah) researches the increasingly isolated princess (Elizabeth Debicki), he becomes obsessed with getting the chance to interview her. His ambition eventually overrides his journalistic ethics: In an effort to win her trust and secure the exclusive, he forges bank statements to suggest she’s being spied upon by people close to her, which makes her feel scared and alone — but does, in fact, get her to agree to the interview.
Ahead of the release of Season 5 — and Episode 8, “Gunpowder,” which portrays the iconic TV special — Puwanarajah spoke to Tudum about playing the determined journalist and filming the pivotal sequence.
Did you watch the interview or follow this drama at all when it actually happened?
You’re making a massive judgment about how old I am there! [laughs] But you’re right, because I was like 13, 13 or 14. I don’t think I watched it, but I think I was aware of it. I wasn’t a particularly newsy kid when I was little. But I was very aware of it — because of her, I think, and feeling sort of close to her... a very particular feeling, I think, for all of us, really. I’d also been aware of Martin Bashir as a journalist; it was always very unusual to see a face that wasn’t white on the news at that time. When I talk to a lot of my friends and colleagues who are people of color, they kind of say the same about television in the ’90s — that, you know, you’d sort of call down your other family members, because a brown person was on TV.
How did you prepare for the role?
First there was an audition process that was, in itself, quite thorough and then there was some script work and a lot of rehearsal. I watched interview footage and familiarized myself with the way in which he interviewed subjects, his approach to that. And then there was a little bit of voice work, a bit of physical movement work, to try and figure out where he holds his energy — which is just one of those actor-y ways of saying, like, “Physically, what sort of embodiment can you get close to?”
It’s such a famous interview and such famous actual video footage. How much freedom or flexibility was there in filming that scene for The Crown?
My approach wasn’t to try and absolutely track what was happening in that original interview and transpose it into this. And by that I mean, specifically, things around voice and posture — stuff like that. I’d worked out particular little things that I felt were characteristic that I made the starting points for the depiction of the character. So those things I allowed to just sort of happen, as you do as an actor. But, of course, we were very mindful of the reality of that interview, and the content of that interview, and trying to recreate its energy and its spirit as faithfully as possible for the exact reasons that you say — because it’s something that so many of us recognize and remember. And actually the show is interested in things around that, what all the other characters are feeling around the airing of that. So it was important that it was a recognizable center of a broader system of dramatic beats happening.
It’s an intense sequence — how was working with Elizabeth Debicki as your scene partner for it?
Elizabeth’s brilliant. She was in my third audition and was already extraordinary and brilliant and hardworking then. And when we got into rehearsals, we worked away almost like we’d work on a stage play. We had a lot of time to just get into it. And she’s a terrific scene partner, really. We rehearsed it a lot in advance, and then we did [an] afternoon’s rehearsal on set, and then filming paused for a week. So we had a week to gestate it in our minds. We came back a week later and filmed it over the course of a day.
What sort of pressure did you feel in regard to playing someone real and portraying such a sensitive historical event?
Well, the word you use there, sensitive, is exactly the thing. I wanted to ensure that I was as rigorous and robust as possible in terms of my preparation. In a sense, that’s all you can do, is just be as prepared as you can and mindful of the work that you’re doing, the acknowledgment that these are people who are in the public consciousness — as well as, in the case of Martin Bashir, a person who’s alive. So I wouldn’t say so much a pressure as just something that we were all constantly aware of and working in the context of.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Watch The Crown Season 5 on Netflix now.
