Princess Diana’s fate in The Crown Season 6, Part 1 is no surprise, but the events leading up to her death still remain a mystery. Reprising her role in the final season of Peter Morgan’s groundbreaking series, Elizabeth Debicki’s portrayal explores the final weeks of the late Princess of Wales’ life. Since the character’s introduction in Season 4, then played by Emma Corrin, Diana’s life has been far from a fairy tale. Although her story ends in tragedy, the first four episodes of Season 6 tell of her whirlwind romance with Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla), a film producer and the son of businessman Mohamed al-Fayed (Salim Daw).
“It’s a really unique challenge as an actor to portray those days because we know where the story is going,” Debicki says in the featurette above. Adds Abdalla, “It’s not about knowing the ending. You know the ending. It’s about exploring as accurately as possible the tensions that bring you to that place.”
Traditionally, The Crown has packed several years of storytelling into each season. Given the weight of Diana’s story, the first four episodes only take place over the course of six weeks. “Khalid and I were very determined that what our job in this season was to do, because we all know where we’re heading, was to play against that as actors and allow these moments that you see to be so full of joy and so full of life,” Debicki shared during a panel at the LA premiere of the final season.
In Episode 1, we see a more playful side of Diana as she vacations with her sons on a yacht in Saint-Tropez. It’s there that Mohamed tries to set her up with his oldest son, Dodi, hoping the pair will get acquainted during their time together on the yacht. “It was only six weeks from meeting to when they died, but clearly it was wild, and clearly it was fun,” Abdalla said at the panel. Unaware of what’s to come, Diana and Dodi enjoy themselves at sea, jumping off diving boards into the ocean and chasing each other around the yacht.
At the premiere, Abdalla also described playing Dodi as “one of the great roles of my life” and felt a responsibility to tell his character’s story as accurately as possible. “Dodi is a person who has been on supermarket shelves in magazines. People know of his ending, and then nothing else about him. What did he stand for? What was his story?” he said.
In Episode 1 of The Crown’s companion documentary series, Beneath the Crown, host Anita Rani adds, “Dodi had a reputation as a playboy, thanks to his long list of girlfriends… The backlash against the couple that ensued in the press contained racist overtones that targeted Dodi’s ethnicity.” After reading countless articles and studying video footage of Dodi and Diana together in Paris, Abdalla learned that his character was a gentle and shy soul. “After 26 years, we get to know him, we get to love him, and finally, after 26 years, we get to mourn him,” he added.
Debicki shares that she couldn’t have done this final season without Abdalla as her co-star. “It was very difficult to re-create. It was heavy, manic, and incredibly invasive,” she says of Diana and Dodi’s scenes with the paparazzi. “The media invasion into that relationship and the world’s attention on it, the way that Peter’s written it, so destabilizes their ability to keep connecting on that level.”
Because Diana had left her official royal life behind, she was no longer afforded the same respect and boundaries. “What emerged served to expose how the tornado of press coverage around them was often based on nothing more than speculation. It highlighted how such coverage had the power to shape and manipulate opinions,” says Rani.
But, it’s through Diana and Dodi’s relationship that the show builds to the tragedy that everyone knows is to come. “Obviously, it’s devastating, it’s fraught, and we can never know [all the details],” says Debicki. “But, it was a very important part of the story to tell.”
Much of that speculation surrounds Diana and Dodi’s final moments at the Ritz in Paris. Episode 3 reimagines the conversation the couple had before leaving the hotel to get into their car, but Morgan also provides a glimpse into what might have gone on privately in their room. Annie Sulzberger, head of research for The Crown, tells Tudum, “When we watched [the CCTV footage] and we saw the body language as they’re heading down to the car, we wanted to honor that.”
Through the footage, Sulzberger and her team saw that the couple were holding hands and being affectionate with one another. “If the body language had been angry or distant, then that would’ve likely shifted the scene that we wrote before in the Ritz — but the body language wasn’t that,” she explains. “The body language was still kind and caring and a little intimate, so we knew that that was going to be a pillar, an indicator for us, of what came before.”
In the hotel scene, Dodi pulls the “Dis-Moi Oui” ring out of his pocket and proposes to Diana. “That was the last scene that Elizabeth and I did together, and it came following the lengthy journey that we’d been on, which I’ve come to describe as a ‘pilgrimage,’ ” Abdalla tells Tudum. You can read the script page below.
While we may never know if a proposal occurred in that hotel room, Sulzberger says that CCTV footage does show Dodi holding a ring that night. “Was it an engagement ring? Was it a ring that she simply liked and it was purchased out of friendship? We know that Dodi gave her an enormous number of gifts — it was one of the things he always did to his partners,” she says.
Although, on the show, Diana turns down the proposal, Abdalla believes it was a moment of genuine love between the characters before their deaths. “It was so important that at that moment, a love is expressed,” he says. “You get a deep, deep honesty between them, where you feel that they know they have been good for each other without needing to answer the question, ‘Will they be together for the rest of their lives or not?’ ” It’s not our job to answer these questions, it’s to ask them as intensely as possible. And somehow, in that scene — which was amazing to do — it gets the most intense.”
The Crown Season 6, Part 1 is now streaming on Netflix.
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