Une stature inhabituelle : 1,90 m, soit bien plus que Geena Davis, Sigourney Weaver ou Nicole Kidman, réputées être les plus grandes actrices de Hollywood. Une taille qui fait sa singularité et en impose. Une taille qui, avant qu’elle ne devienne une force, fut d’abord une malchance pour Elizabeth Debicki : trop grande pour tout, surtout pour devenir ballerine, son rêve d’enfant et le métier de ses deux parents, danseurs classiques. Tout cela est derrière elle quand on la rencontre à Paris, où elle est née il y a trente-deux ans, par hasard, au gré des pérégrinations familiales.

La voilà chez Dior, dont elle est ambassadrice joaillerie. De grands yeux clairs de chat mélancolique, un sourire énigmatique, qui trahit peut-être une lucidité amusée sur le monde qui l’entoure, un port d’altesse, des jambes longues comme un soir de Noël à Balmoral : telle est cette comédienne cosmopolite, de nationalité australienne, découverte en 2013 dans Gatsby le Magnifique, de Baz Luhrmann, aux côtés de Leonardo DiCaprio, puis vue notamment dans Tenet, de Christopher Nolan. Qui d’autre qu’elle pouvait incarner le rôle de Lady Diana dans la cinquième saison de la série à succès The Crown, diffusée depuis novembre sur Netflix. Rôle qu’elle a déjà retrouvé pour la sixième et dernière saison, dont le tournage vient de s’achever.

Après Naomi Watts (Diana, d’Oliver Hirschbiegel), Emma Corrin (The Crown, saison 4) Kristen Stewart (Spencer, de Pablo Larraín), Elizabeth Debicki est entrée dans la liste VIP des actrices qui ont eu le privilège d’évoquer la cultissime princesse de Galles. Pour Debicki, c’est durant les six dernières années de sa vie, entre 1991 et 1997, les années les plus tumultueuses de son existence et les plus périlleuses qu’ait connues la monarchie anglaise, avec l’incendie du château de Windsor, le divorce des enfants d’Élisabeth II, le Camillagate, les règlements de compte par interviews interposées entre Charles et Diana, la biographie explosive d’Andrew Morton et le divorce du couple princier. Six années capitales, selon Peter Morgan, l’auteur de la série, durant lesquelles la jeune princesse perdue se transforme en altesse combattante qui prépare son évasion.

À cette époque, certains ont stigmatisé Lady Diana, la jugeant déséquilibrée, fragile, superficielle, enfant gâtée… Alors, pour ces raisons, elle s’est défendue vaillamment, a utilisé les médias pour se faire entendre, dire sa vérité de femme, de femme malheureuse, trompée et sous-estimée. «En cela, je la trouve très moderne, très féministe, avance Elizabeth Debicki. Elle a participé à l’émancipation des femmes en difficulté, qui, grâce à elle, ont osé s’exprimer sans crainte.» Telle est la vision de la princesse de Galles que l’actrice a choisi de montrer. «Non pas une princesse rebelle ou capricieuse, ajoute-t-elle, mais une princesse révolutionnaire, celle qui a été la première à briser les tabous en rompant le silence de mise à la Cour.» [More at Source]

It’s a Friday morning in Spain when Elizabeth Debicki Zooms in from the Mallorca set of The Crown, where the Australian actor is currently filming season six as Diana, Princess of Wales. “I’m in a little flat with a very interesting clock on the wall,” she deadpans, referring to her basic holiday rental that’s dwarfed by a frameless timepiece, comprised of numerals painted directly onto the white wall over her shoulder. “The first time I came here was doing The Night Manager, which I was horrified to count backwards and realise was seven years ago,” the 32-year-old continues, blue eyes sparkling behind oversized tortoiseshell frames. Lifting a wine glass, she adds, “This is a protein shake, in a wine glass, because we’re out of normal glasses. Please don’t judge.”

Right now, life for Debicki is somewhat topsy-turvy and time is clearly on her mind. “It’s such a strange experiment, you come to beautiful places that people only come to have a lovely vacation, and you work really hard and funny hours. The first week you’re like, ‘I can have a nice lunch and do my work. I’m totally capable.’ Then after the third week, you’re like this nocturnal animal. You’re so tired and you see people having dinner under your building and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. Restaurant.’ It’s such a weird experience.”

Production on season six is now back into overdrive after a respectful pause for the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. “We had just gotten to Barcelona, and I think we’d shot a day,” she recalls. “Of course, we paused, which was the right thing to do. It was very surreal, very sad and very sobering for everybody. I suddenly felt very homesick,” she shares, referring to her parents, and younger brother and sister, back in Melbourne. “I could tell it was really hard for people to be away from their families,” she continues, explaining that 95 per cent of The Crown’s crew are English. “Grief, as we all know, sneaks up in the oddest of ways. All the crew and cast stayed in the same hotel, and everyone just kept passing each other. It’s strange being on location because it’s liminal space where you don’t have to do your laundry, but you’re not at work and you don’t know what to do. I spent a lot of time watching that queue,” she says of the line to visit the monarch Lying-in-State, which was 10 miles long and a 24-hour wait at its peak. “It was just the perfect snapshot of what English people are and [are] capable of. It was very moving.”

After years commuting between Sydney and London in her 20s for many a film set and to tread the boards at Britain’s National Theatre, Debicki, who was born in Paris but raised in Melbourne, has been based in North London since 2018. “I miss them really a lot all the time,” she says of her close-knit family. Her parents, both professional dancers, ignited her passion for the arts. “But I guess I’ve gotten used to missing people. That’s the expat’s lot. When I land in Australia, the wash of familiarity, comfort and nostalgia is extremely settling for me. But London feels like my home now.”

Debicki was last back in Melbourne in August for a surprise visit for her birthday. “I just really wanted to see my dad’s face, and he gave me what I really needed,” she smiles. “He was watering something in the front yard and I jumped out of the corner. My sister was filming it. My mum opens the door with this all-knowing look and she’s like, ‘I knew you were here. I felt it!’ I was like, ‘Oh, come on. Give it to me, I just flew across the ocean!’” [More at Source]

Elizabeth and the cast of Tenet are on the upcoming July cover of Entertainment Weekly! Elizabeth looks amazing in the sneak peek we got about her character in the interview.

This is a mere sliver of what the movie is going to be,” Tenet producer Emma Thomas tells EW in the sweltering California desert this past October. If this is a sliver, writer-director Christopher Nolan’s latest film is going to be a doozy: On an expanse of dusty, sun-blasted terrain approximately 80 miles east of Palm Springs, an abandoned city of destroyed buildings and rubble has been constructed from scratch, a vast set populated by hundreds of extras in military camouflage uniforms. As the day progresses, and the temperature climbs, two of the film’s stars, John David Washington and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, repeatedly sprint down the road bifurcating the cityscape. Robert Pattinson, driving an armored military vehicle, is in hot pursuit; he’s followed by another truck holding both an IMAX camera and Nolan. The whole shebang is pretty much the most impressive Hollywood-financed flex you could hope to see. Even Nolan, 49, who has plenty of experience directing outsize movies — Interstellar, Inception, and the Christian Bale-starring Dark Knight trilogy — seems impressed. “The set would certainly rank as one of the largest-scale outdoor builds of all time,” he says. “It’s colossal.”

It is something of a surprise that EW has been invited to witness the proceedings today, given the secrecy surrounding the Warner Bros. film. When the news of Nolan’s new project starring Washington, Pattinson, and Taylor-Johnson broke in May 2019, the studio described the movie, with deliberate vagueness, as “an action epic evolving from the world of international espionage.” Today, Thomas remains extremely tight-lipped about the project, whose cast also includes Elizabeth Debicki, Clémence Poésy, Himesh Patel, Nolan regular Michael Caine, and Kenneth Branagh, who appeared in the director’s previous film Dunkirk. The producer politely declines to answer even the most basic of questions, such as what country are we supposed to be in now? “I know people think we’re secretive, and we’re generally not,” says Thomas, who is married to Nolan and has produced all his movies. “On this one there’s a little bit more…” Thomas pauses, then changes tack. “All will become clear!”

This air of mystery, combined with Nolan’s reputation as a creator of original blockbusters admired by audiences and critics alike, made Tenet one of 2020’s must-see releases the second it was announced. But in the months since EW’s set visit, the film has come to represent much more, as the coronavirus pandemic forced cinemas to close and almost every film scheduled for release prior to Tenet’s initial July 17 arrival to be postponed. While other summer movies were eventually pushed back or dispatched to streaming services, Tenet held firm. Warner Bros. and Nolan did eventually delay the film’s release, but only by two weeks, announcing on June 12 that the film will now come out July 31, a week after Mulan. Should those two movies prove successful, it will trigger the resumption of a normal — or normal-ish — summer movie season. “[Tenet is] kind of a unicorn of a movie anyway, because it’s not based on an IP thing,” says Pattinson. “But after all this — hopefully it will be a ridiculously overwhelming experience.” [More at Source]

I’ve updated the gallery with the photoshoot and digital scans of Elizabeth’s feature in next month’s Harper Bazaar’s Australia.

   
   

I’ve updated the gallery with the newly released interview and photoshoot that Elizabeth did for InStyle June 2019.