Elizabeth Debicki is one of December covers of British Vogue. The cover is so bad, my God. Emma Corrin did something similar when they played Princess Diana too – Corrin went for more avant-garde editorial looks, as if they were trying to draw a line between “this is me” and “that’s Diana.” Anyway, Debicki is a beautiful woman but this cover is not the look. The interview is good though – she’s not a royalist, and she approached Diana as a character to be built and worked on. Some highlights from this piece.

She was nervous when she was cast as Diana: “I think in the very beginning that did overwhelm me, the idea of this kind of collective [of Diana disciples] out there. It’s a trap, right? A swampy quagmire. So, I would stand over the kitchen sink and say, ‘I cannot do this.’… [but then I realized] This isn’t meta. These are characters. It’s a part.”

Debicki is sanguine. “I don’t have any big opinions about the Royal Family. That’s an advantage here, right?” Do you know any of them, I ask, “No,” she replies, laughing at the idea. “Maybe I never will now. Prince Harry seems fun,” she adds, but says she doesn’t follow royal news at all. “The Daily Mail makes me nauseous. But anyone who works on the show has a sense of how extremely difficult it is to be born into that [life]… The rules are sort of decided for you as well: less is more. Although, of course, Diana broke that rule. She broke the fourth wall, reaped the benefits, but the consequences came hard and heavy.”

The revenge dress: “The revenge dress was pressure.” How were the fittings? “Lengthy. It’s a complex dress. I let the fittings happen around me while I thought about what the dress meant. Why this dress? She’d had it for two or three years. It was super risqué at the time.” And? “She was claiming the space. The way she walked out of that car, the luminosity, the strength of her as that car door opened, she was so fast and so forward. It’s an extraordinary thing to watch. To decide what you’re saying about yourself through fashion… it was a currency. An incredibly powerful currency.”

She loves Diana now: “I will say it’s a huge gift to learn what I’ve learnt about this person. In so many ways, it’s a story of immense transformation – and triumph too. The public got to watch her evolve into an incredibly strong woman, trying to control a narrative that was the slipperiest thing ever. When you’re media fodder, what sells a newspaper is everything but it was always personal for her. How could it not be?”

Silent screams: The lengthy marriage break-up scenes are a tough watch and were exhausting to shoot, she says, “because you’re in the subterranean part of the psyche, the most painful bits”. In a long, imagined denouement between Diana and Charles at Kensington Palace, the Prince rails: “I leave here liberated. I’m only more certain that with you out of my life and out of this family can anyone find the happiness and the stability that has eluded us for 16 years.” Diana, sat at the kitchen table, crumbles in tears, screaming silently.

[From British Vogue]

I think it’s smart for her to talk about how she doesn’t follow royal news, she has no connection to the royals or the machinery around them. It’s less dangerous for her. By that I mean, considering the royal campaign against The Crown, I’m worried that people will start coming for the actors. Dominic West seems to be handling that well, but I get the feeling that Debicki just wants to slip away and hide as soon as people see this season. She’s also right about Diana’s transformation during this time period. I wish The Crown had built that into Season 4 more, that Diana scared the sh-t out of the Windsors right away because she was so effortlessly good with people and had such high emotional intelligence. But when Diana hit her 30s, she really blossomed and found so much solace in her work. Which scared the Windsors even more.

This British Vogue video is amazing:

Photos courtesy of Netflix/The Crown, cover courtesy of British Vogue.