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]

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]

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]

 

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]

The Season 4 finale of The Crown ends with Emma Corrin’s Diana standing on the edge of a family Christmas photo. Nearly a decade into her marriage, she’s finally coming to terms with the fact that things haven’t gone as planned. As Princess of Wales, she’s a central figure in the royal family; but as an individual, she feels very much out of place in a system designed for conformity. The camera slowly zooms in on her face, and she appears both determined and resigned as she contemplates what to do next.

Season 5, which premieres on Netflix on Nov. 9, ushers in a new chapter in Diana’s story. Now played by Elizabeth Debicki, the character encounters challenges and triumphs as the series enters the ’90s, a decade of turmoil and self-discovery. You may recognize some familiar themes: Once again, Diana’s relationship with Charles (now played by Dominic West) is on shaky ground, and she chafes at the rigid rules that govern the members of the House of Windsor. But unlike her younger self, this version of Diana is never skirting the frame. Even through losses and setbacks, she plunges into the spotlight, embracing the heady brew of style, empathy and charisma that made her one of the most famous women in the world.

Ahead, Debicki reflects on her transformation into this more recognizable Diana and teases what to expect from the character (revenge dress, anyone?) this season.

How would you describe Diana’s mindset when we meet her at the beginning of Season 5?
I feel like it’s a pretty direct pickup of where we left with Emma [Corrin] playing Diana. The character’s trying to conform and make peace with things within the family that she’s in and within the marriage that she’s in. I think that there is a hopefulness that things can be repaired, when we first pick up. It’s very interesting playing these characters because we pick up the bat of what’s been laid out before us. It’s a unique way to start playing a part, really, because there’s a transition that the writing seamlessly does, and then we, as the actors, have to take this leap of faith, and then the audience does it with us. It’s unusual, but it’s also really exciting and it’s challenging. [More at Source]

The fifth season of The Crown will introduce viewers to a brand new cast as the action moves into a new era.

Elizabeth Debicki has taken on the role of Princess Diana, replacing season 4 star Emma Corrin, and the new episodes see the Australian actress tasked with reenacting a tumultuous period in the late royal’s life.

Set in the ’90s, season 5 dramatises the collapse of Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles (Dominic West) and her ensuing loneliness as she becomes yet more isolated from her royal in-laws, as well as her decision to go public with her grievances in her notorious Panorama interview with Martin Bashir.

Speaking in this week’s Radio Times magazine, Debicki responded to suggestions that some viewers might see the Princess’s behaviour as “manipulative” or selfish in some scenes, explaining that it is “fascinating” to hear different responses to her character after spending so long immersed in the role.

“There’s a part of me that goes, ‘No, I’m not,’ because I’ve been inside the character for so long,” she said. “It’s fascinating because it’s the first time we’re really hearing it, it’s interesting that that’s your read on it.”

The star went on to reveal that the new season explores the tabloid media landscape in Britain in the ’90s, and examines Diana’s relationship with those publications.

“The character of Diana has a very interesting relationship at that point in the story with the media, because it’s something that can be used to a perceived advantage, and then, at times, obviously it can backfire because it’s an extremely unruly beast.” [More at Source]

Elizabeth Debicki has had Diana, Princess of Wales on her mind for at least five years. When she first auditioned for The Crown, the soapy royal family saga that doubles up as a tabloid flashpoint, it wasn’t to play Diana at all. She read for a part way back in season two, though she won’t say which, because someone else played it “beautifully”. “Also, if I told people, they’d be like, what?” she adds, as if the idea is absurd, which means we can only speculate that she was up for the part of Prince Philip.

She thought she had blown it. “Well, I did, in the fact that I did not get the part,” she deadpans. The Crown’s creator, Peter Morgan, spotted something else, however. “They obviously saw something Diana-ish in my audition, which is really not what I was going for at that time.” Her agent called her and asked if she’d be interested in playing Diana at some point in the future. She filed it away in the back of her mind, where it lurked until a couple of years ago. Then she got the call. “It was a much more formal, will you do this role?” She’d had plenty of time to think about it. She said yes.

Debicki lives in London, but we are speaking on a video call as she is in Mallorca filming The Crown’s sixth and reportedly final season. She has come to my rescue, giving me clear instructions about how to make the windows bigger, which she finds funny, as usually she’s the one in need of tech support. “Any technology I use is running on some ancient program. People open it up and they’re like, why is this from 2004? Why do you have 874 unread emails?” She picks up her phone and shows me her email app. It’s actually 23,460 unread emails. That’s disgraceful! “It’s utterly, utterly revolting,” she grins. She has friends who, when they meet her for coffee, open up her phone, just so they can delete some of her messages.

This is a rare day off for her and she is feeling tired. It is easy to understand why; much of The Crown’s fifth season is Diana-heavy and deals with the final collapse of her marriage to Prince (now King) Charles. We talk for almost an hour and a half, and she fidgets admirably. She puts her glasses on and takes them off. She wears her hair up, and down, up, and down. She scratches her forehead, her nose, touching her mouth, her face, always moving, just a bit. This is all the more striking because most of her characters, from Jed in The Night Manager to Kat in Tenet, are glacially still, regally sombre, near-encased in their own sadness. One of the reasons she doesn’t often get recognised in the street, she suspects, is because she doesn’t much resemble her characters off-duty, and in the case of The Crown that’s certainly true. Even after two years of filming, her long, straight blond hair came as a surprise to one of the makeup artists on set, who had assumed that the Diana hair was real and that Debicki’s real hair was a wig. “At least we’re selling it,” she says. [More at Source]