Where do you call home right now in your life?

London is home for the meantime – I made a more permanent move here in 2018. Before that I had spent many years finding myself in London to work on films or in theatre, so I’d end up spending up to six months of the year here and then the other months scattered around the globe. I realised London was my home the first time landing at Heathrow felt like I had landed somewhere totally and utterly familiar, and that comforted me deeply. Even the bad airport coffee and drive to my flat made me feel nestled in something that spoke of home. I had loved ones close, and the city was starting to make sense to me. So I moved here.

Which room do you spend most time in?

Honestly, my bedroom. I try to prioritise sleep (sometimes that is a total lost cause with strange shooting schedules) but my bedroom is very soothing to me. There is plenty of room to roll out my yoga mat. I often nestle up on a chair in there to read scripts, to get away from people; I might take my coffee back into bed if I have the day off. So it sees the most of me of all the rooms.

Where was home for you as a child?

The first few years of my life were spent in 18th in Paris. Then we moved when I was nearly six to the southeastern suburbs of Melbourne. Absolutely worlds apart in terms of the childhoods they offered me. My Australian childhood was a sunny safe place. My best friend lived a five-minute walk away. We walked to school together every morning. There was a milk bar for lollies and and a chicken shop for hot chips and a big green park at the end of our street where kids played AFL football all Saturday.

Can you describe the first place you lived when you moved away from the home where you grew up?

My first real move, when I left and didn’t really come back home, was to shoot my first film, The Great Gatsby. I had just finished acting school and while I had been in university I lived partly out of home, partly in cold share houses, partly with a boyfriend. So my big grown-up move was to work on that film. I had just turned 21. I lived in an apartment in Surrey Hills, Sydney. It was a very bare little flat, but I thought it was perfect. It was part of a complex, with a brick balcony and a little plain kitchen. I bought a huge casserole dish from a charity shop the second day I was there because I had grand plans of being a grown-up and slow-cooking. Of course, all I did was work and party and subsist on takeaways and the very, very good coffees I could find from the many excellent Sydney cafés on my street. [More at Source]

Happy new year everyone!

I’ve updated the gallery with photos of Elizabeth attending the 81st Golden Globe Awards Ceremony where she won Best Supporting Female Actor – Television for her role as Princess Diana in Netflix’s The Crown.

The time has come for the world to bid farewell to one of the most acclaimed television dramas of the past decade as The Crown wraps its sixth and final season. For Elizabeth Debicki, the actor whose portrayal of Princess Diana has earned her Emmy, Golden Globe, and SAG nominations, the final season means bringing her beloved character to her tragic end.

Through Season 5, Debicki plays a Diana whose marriage is splintering and who is unable to shake the all-consuming attention of the public, who were not willing to let go of the “People’s Princess” as she leaves behind the British royal family. Season 6’s first four episodes explore a Diana who is looking for breathing room, attempting to enjoy a holiday with her sons and companion Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) in France and navigate post-Palace life. But she’s unable to escape the frenzied flashbulbs of the paparazzi and a media obsession that leads to both her and Fayed’s deaths.

Diana’s passing, a historical heartbreak that was felt around the world, brings Debicki’s time as the character to a close. The actor now looks back at her time on Peter Morgan’s award-winning series, and the pieces of Diana that will be hard to leave behind as she, too, bids farewell to The Crown.

Benji Wilson: After your terrific performance in Season 5, how did it feel to come back on set for the sixth and final season of The Crown?
Elizabeth Debicki: It felt like coming home. We shot Season 5 for almost a year, and it just felt very natural to be back. There were about four months in between but that went very quickly, and I was always thinking about Season 6.

How did you find coming back to the character?
ED: I did a little refresher course in my brain. But I had been inhabiting it, or it was inhabiting me, for quite a while. It was very quick to come back to, and, actually, a relief. It was an interesting acting experiment for me because I’ve never really come back to shoot something in the second season. Loads of actors do it all the time, but I’ve never had that experience. So, it’s a thrill because there’s a part of your mind that’s testing how much is still there. But it felt like my relationship to the things that I had been actively doing in Season 5 was quite naturally there. It was much less recall; it almost felt more normal to do it than to be normal-person me. [More at Source]

Elizabeth Debicki first caught fire with her breakthrough performance as the La Garçonne golf icon Jordan Baker from The Great Gatsby. Later, she added roles in Tenet, Windows, and The Night Manager to her repertoire of performances that solidified her as a force in Hollywood to be reckoned with. But it was her portrayal as Princess Diana in season five of The Crown that took the world by storm with the Australian actress’ stark resemblance to the late princess that captured her recluse disposition, shy tone, and unparalleled elegance.

One thing that resonates profoundly with Debicki is her unwavering grace, a quality she carried with her beyond her portrayal of Princess Diana. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Debicki emerged as the undeniable choice as Dior Joaillerie’s brand ambassador, gracing the front row seats of Dior’s Fall 2023 Haute Couture presentation glammed up in Dior Beauty, with her inherent sense of sophistication that embodies the very essence of the Maison.

CR Fashion Book: What is the inspiration behind your look today?
Elizabeth Debicki: My glorious stylist Elizabeth Saltzman and the team from Dior and myself just really loved the idea of creating a classic Dior look that felt fresh and modern. The silhouette to me feels elegant and fun and I love that there is a little drama with the fascinator. I wanted it to live in that elusive place of feeling totally myself and also telling a story.

CR: Were there any moments from the show that stood out to you?
ED: The Dior couture show is always such a joy. It is so immersive, like theatre. I adored the structure and the grace of the caped pieces. Everything about the styling of the show was pure goddess energy. Their feet were firmly planted on the ground in their Grecian sandals and their simple structured plaits pulled to the back. I loved! Maria Grazia’s design to me is always so fiercely feminine. A really divine combination of fragility and nobility. The beaded dresses were incredible. [More at Source]

Australian actor Elizabeth Debicki has now lived in England long enough to know how she likes her tea, a pot of which she’s letting steep in front of her.

“Leave the bag in for as long as humanly possible,” she says. “I want it to hit me like coffee, but I want it to still be tea.”

That’s a pretty apt metaphor for her lauded turn as Princess Diana Spencer in the fifth season of “The Crown”: an intense portrait of exiled loneliness inside an uncanny rendering of that gossamer lilt of a voice, warmly teasing charm, and mannerisms. After two years playing her — with Season 6 streaming later this year — Debicki realized letting go of so demanding a role wouldn’t be simple.

“At a certain stage toward the end of it, it dawned on me that I’d have to very consciously unpeel the layers,” says Debicki, who credits having dancer parents, and her own ballet training, with a very body-conscious approach to acting. She also acknowledges how much her osteopath has helped her with the factory-reset part of the gig.

“The other day, he was like, ‘Can we go back to your [own] body?’” she says with a gentle laugh. “The actor wants the body to be as neutral a canvas as possible so you can impact on it and become somebody else, how they want to move.”

For Debicki, Diana’s physicality was about so much more than the recognizable head-drop. “Everyone and their mother does that,” Debicki says. “My plumber does it; it’s so incessant!” Rather, she sought a deeper understanding of Diana’s presence in any given scene. “She was quite tall, but there’s also this deep humility that seemed to be emanating out, not wanting to take up too much space, knowing that you inherently take up so much space because you’re so luminous. I think it was always a slight kind of deferral.” She adds, “Bodies have maps of all the things they’ve endured: the knocks, the highlights, the beliefs they’ve inherited.”

When Debicki was still relatively industry-fresh, and “The Crown” was an instant hit, she’d tried out for a small Season 2 role that she didn’t get — “I was physically wrong for it” — but which led to whispers that the production would be interested in her for Diana down the road. Emma Corrin’s Season 4 casting as the princess-to-be briefly spurred a “you win some, you lose some” feeling, she notes, until early 2020, when the offer came to be the 1990s Diana. A pandemic-delayed start gave Debicki a wealth of time to prepare. [More at Source]

I’ve updated the gallery with photos of Elizabeth attending “The Crown” Finale Celebration.

 

I’ve updated the gallery with photos of Elizabeth looking divine in a beautiful Oscar de la Renta dress while attending the Marvel premiere of “Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3”.

Star quality: It’s that ineffable trait that makes an actor pop off the screen. When a performer has it, you become entirely absorbed by the characters they play, the scenes they seem to so effortlessly inhabit. Anyone who’s witnessed actor Elizabeth Debicki’s astonishing work as Diana, Princess of Wales in The Crown knows that the Australian actor has star quality in spades.

Taking over the role from Emma Corrin, Debicki brings a more mature Diana to the fifth season of creator Peter Morgan’s prestige drama, which unfolds during the early 1990s. It’s a period when Diana is attempting to chart a new and more independent course for her life, but every effort she makes to have her voice heard — whether cooperating on a covert biography or granting a candid interview to the unscrupulous Martin Bashir (Prasanna Puwanarajah) — only brings more intense scrutiny. The public spotlight is unrelenting.

Portraying one of the twentieth century’s most iconic women, Debicki understood that her performance would be carefully examined. “It’s an enormous amount of pressure as an actor,” she says, “because you don’t usually have to play [a role] that someone else has just played so excellently. Then, of course, there’s the responsibility that you feel to do this person’s legacy justice. They’re two quite different pressures, but they both work in tandem when you start doing this job. That was, at times, pretty overwhelming.”

Fortunately, Debicki isn’t one to shy away from a challenge. She came to The Crown after delivering a decade of impressive performances dating back to her breakthrough in 2013’s The Great Gatsby. Notable turns in television (The Night Manager) and film (Widows, Tenet) followed, showcasing her versatility and range. “You have to sift through what Diana’s become — because people need her to become a certain representation or symbol — to get to the real-life person,” says Debicki of how she began to practically approach the creative challenge that lay ahead of her.

Debicki shared with Queue her personal recollections of the former Princess of Wales, the experience of inhabiting Diana’s psyche for so long, and how one well-timed glass of champagne helped launch her career.

Krista Smith: I first saw you in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, playing Jordan Baker, the incredibly chic professional golfer. Your co-stars were Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, and Tobey Maguire, and you were the discovery in that film.
Elizabeth Debicki: I was out of drama school for, I think, two months when I got to do a screen test for Gatsby. I was in Melbourne where I’d just finished school. I went to [an] almost religiously theater-based training school. The methodology was very physical, lots of clowning, lots of Shakespeare and Chekhov. We were told very clearly, “You are lucky if you get a job, period, and it will only be in theater,” which is what I was aspiring to at the time. So, I didn’t know how to do a screen test. I went in there, and I was nervous as hell. There was a camera and a lovely reader who read very, very quickly, which made me drop my lines. I mean, I felt like I did it 12 times. I probably did it four times. Somehow, that [audition] tape magically found its way into Baz’s [hands]. I honestly don’t even know how you get Baz to sit down, so it was incredible that he sat and watched it. And then they flew me to L.A., and I did a screen test with Tobey at the Chateau [Marmont], which was one of the strangest and most memorable experiences of my life.

I’d never been to L.A. before. Tobey and I read the scene, Baz is filming us, and my hair’s in this fake little bob. We staged the whole thing. We go around the table, and we sit on the couch. He’s just following us like a puppy dog with this camera. Then we go to the bedroom and there’s another scene. I’m lounging around on the bed, and I’m just talking the whole time. I have no idea what accent I was doing. It went for about an hour and a half. The entire time I thought, I literally have nothing to lose. It was an incredibly freeing thing because I thought, I’m probably never going to see these people ever again. I went downstairs, and I remember thinking, We’ve got two hours or something until I have to leave for the airport. I’ll have a glass of champagne in the sunshine. I think I was 20 at the time. Is that legal? [More at Source]

I’ve updated the gallery with photos of Elizabeth attending the 25th Costume Designers Guild Awards.

I’ve updated the gallery with photos of Elizabeth attending the 29th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards.