Season 5 of The Crown brings the historical drama into the ’90s — a decade marked by tragedy for the show’s characters. Though the season ends before Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) meets her heartbreaking fate in August of 1997, it portrays her moving inexorably towards it: first extricating herself from the family she married into (sometimes employing rather impulsive tactics) and then trying desperately to find her own place in the world, having shed the one imposed on her by marriage.
A piece of that puzzle is Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla), the boyfriend alongside whom she died in that 1997 car crash. But despite Fayed’s name having “been on everyone’s lips for 25 years,” Abdalla muses, “no one knows anything about him.”
The actor dove into research for the role and was surprised to discover how little information was available about the late film producer (whose credits included Chariots of Fire and Hook). A single, brief voice recording — of Fayed calling into Larry King Live for some typically empty TV talk-show banter — became “absolutely essential” for Abdalla, who realized that he otherwise wouldn’t have known how to shape his accent (American, it turns out, “with bits of Egyptian”).
“The stuff that’s written is all the same, and actually probably comes from one source,” Abdalla tells Tudum. “It’s kind of extraordinary when you think about it. How can it be that this figure that I feel so close to, that I feel familiar with, I know nothing about? And surprisingly, then, as a result, he hasn’t been mourned — ever, really. Because how can you mourn someone who you don’t know?” The Crown endeavors to know him. And not just Dodi, but his father, the wealthy businessman Mohamed al-Fayed (Salim Daw) as well.
Mohamed Fayed (later al-Fayed) was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1929. He married the author Samira Khashoggi in 1954. They divorced two years later, but had one son together, Emad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Mena’em Fayed, also known as Dodi. Mohamed began working with his wife’s brother, Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and later went on to run a shipping business and move to England in the 1960s. His business empire eventually included the Paris Ritz Hotel and Harrods, the London department store. In 1986, al-Fayed leased the late Duke of Windsor’s Paris home, overseeing extensive renovations to the villa.
“His character is so, so rich,” Daw tells Tudum of Mohamed. “He’s cruel, he’s funny, he loves life, he wants to be on top all the time, he wants everything — and he got everything he wants.” The father and son are introduced in Episode 3, “Mou Mou,” which focuses almost entirely on Mohamed expanding his business empire and chasing his loftiest dream — validation from, or some kind of identification with, the British royal family.
“The team at The Crown had this choice: do they represent Dodi and Mohamed as these kind of token figures who sort of pass on-screen and that’s it?” Abdalla says. “Or do they get the treatment that everyone else in the royal family gets, to become fully-fledged characters, so that when we get to this moment that has such huge cultural importance to it, we actually get to really explore it?” The Crown chose the latter.
In developing his portrayal of Mohamed, Daw was most surprised by the mogul’s “human side,” he says. “Because he loves, really loves the people around him — his son, his family, and life. He loves life and he’s so human, like a child sometimes. When he’s happy, he’s really happy. When he’s not happy, he [becomes] a very hard man.”
That tension between hardness and childlike warmth inevitably impacts his son, and their “problematic but very loving” dynamic became a key, for Abdalla, to untangle the enigma of Dodi. Though he’s commonly remembered as a playboy, the actor rejects that label: “He was basically someone who, I think, was unable to hold down relationships. Who ended up, as a result, with lots of relationships. And that comes, I think, in part from the problematics around his upbringing and his childhood. [But] gradually, you get ‘playboy.’”
The actor sees him not as “some larger-than-life Hugh Hefner type” at all, but rather a shy, gentlemanly, and kind of awkward guy with an endearing “love of sentimentality and a bit of cheesiness.” This understanding of Dodi came into sharper focus for Abdalla in working with costume designer Amy Roberts (whom Daw appreciatively refers to as “Amy the great”) to find the character’s look. Whenever he wore something “sort of assured and sharp, sort of reflective, it was wrong,” the actor recalls. “But whenever it was something which was like, ‘Oh, I just want to touch him, these are nice colors, he’s kind’ — he was there.”
“When you start to look at the real images of Dodi, you see that in him,” Abdalla continues. “You see what was kind of broken in him, or sad. You start to see what was deeply lovely about him — and you kind of want to give him a hug.”
Watch The Crown Season 5 on Netflix now.
Additional reporting by Emily Zemler.
