Princess Diana appears beyond the grave in “The Crown’s” final season, with its first four episodes having been released Nov. 16.
In addition to setting into place the pieces building up to Diana’s fatal car accident, the series details the aftermath of her death as well. The show’s creators have been known to take historical liberties with their chronicling of the British monarchy and its cast of characters.
Season Six features the princess, portrayed by Elizabeth Debicki, returning as a vision of sorts, which many fans have referred to as a “ghost,” after her death. Debicki said she wasn’t sure how that would go over.
“I really didn’t know,” Debicki told Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb Nov. 17 on TODAY.
“I’m going to be honest. I read it, and I think even when I went to set that day, Dominic (West, who plays Prince Charles) and I sort of, we didn’t really know how to play it,” she continued. “So we thought, we didn’t rehearse it, and I think what people see in the scene is almost maybe the first or second take.”
Debicki also said the vision came from show creator Peter Morgan and was intended to encapsulate the idea of how people grieve the loss of someone.
“What happens is I realized doing it is it’s Peter’s way of kind of, it’s a universal expression of grief in the sense that when you lose a person — this is how I conceptualize (it) — when you lose a person, the first thing you would give anything to do is speak to them again,” she said.
Savannah clarified Debicki’s Diana is “not like a ghost” or “apparition” and instead compared her in the scene to a “vision” or “an imagining of a conversation you might have.”
Debicki, whose work on the Netflix drama has earned her a best supporting actress nomination at this year’s Emmy Awards, agreed and said she and West “played it like a scene,” but also added it had a key benefit.
“What it does allow us to do inside the characters is say things that we’ve wanted to say for two seasons of playing those characters, so it was very moving for us to play it,” she explained.
Still, it’s this season’s episodes in which Queen Elizabeth II and then-Prince Charles speak with the princess after her untimely death that has sparked criticism from viewers.
“This was such an overreach,” wrote one viewer on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, about Charles’ depicted conversation with the late princess. “Strange scene. I stopped crying immediately.”
“I bet it took a lot of guts to propose that scene, but clearly no brain,” wrote another.
Speaking to Variety in a recent profile interview, Morgan explained that while Diana appears to visit her ex-husband and former mother-in-law in the series, she’s not exactly a ghost.
“I never imagined it as Diana’s ‘ghost’ in the traditional sense,” Morgan explained. “It was her continuing to live vividly in the minds of those she has left behind. Diana was unique, and I suppose that’s what inspired me to find a unique way of representing her. She deserved special treatment narratively.”
In a separate interview with Deadline, Morgan underlined further that Diana’s posthumous appearance is meant to anthropomorphize the grief that the queen and prince might have felt in her absence.
“The word ‘ghost’ is unhelpful, I was never writing anything from a supernatural perspective, not at all,” he explained. “It was more an indication that, when someone has just passed, they’re still vivid in the minds of all those close to them and love them. And sometimes it’s impossible to keep them out of the minds. It felt to me more like an extension of her in real life rather than a ghost.”
Debicki previously echoed Morgan’s stance to Deadline. According to the actor, Diana’s appearance after death works more as a manifestation of the long shadow that her death would ultimately cast.
“I’ve always been very intrigued by Peter’s brain, and I think that it’s an interesting, beautiful way to have a conversation about the experience of grief,” Debicki added in the interview.
“I think that that is how we approached it as well. It’s such a slippery, human, crashing, impossible thing to reckon with, the loss of somebody, and I think that his way of imagining that was very beautiful to me, and it made sense.”
Season Six, Part One of “The Crown” debuted Nov. 16 on Netflix. Season Six, Part Two is set to debut on Dec. 14.
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
Laura Davis is an entertainment aficionado who delves into the glitz and glamour of the entertainment industry. From Hollywood to Broadway, she offers readers an insider’s perspective on the world of movies, music, and pop culture.
