Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca were used to film the last days of Diana of Wales in The Crown. Elizabeth Debicki, the actress who plays the town's princess, even visited the Sagrada Familia taking advantage of her time in Barcelona, in her first attempt at filming (remember that the death of Elizabeth of England caused filming to be canceled in September 2022) . But, when Diana's death had to be filmed, Netflix recreated the Paris Soul Tunnel in a studio to maintain maximum secrecy. What we now know, however, is how she approached it and how Debicki felt when interpreting her character's final moments in life.
“It is quite horrendous, it is very abusive to harass someone in this way. I think Khalid [Abdalla] would say the same thing, that you only have to experience it for about 10 seconds to realize how strange and horrendous the experience you are in is,” he explained in statements to The Hollywood Reporter about the persecution they suffered. Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed in their last minutes of life, when the paparazzi risked their lives to take snapshots of the couple.
The idea that the photographers were looking for “a piece” of Diana is something that horrifies her and that she felt when interpreting the scene. She worked not so much from the rational, as if she had to follow the script, but from the instinctive: “You are actually experiencing the pressure of physical experience and therefore you are acting from a very instinctive place.”
Abdalla, who played Dodi in the fourth season and repeats in this fifth, felt similar: after experiencing the scenes, stopped in traffic with photographers poking at the glass, he began to feel a certain aversion in real life when a motorcycle approached to your vehicle. “Imagine that you are living this day in and day out,” he said in his brief interview on the occasion of the premiere of the fifth season this coming Thursday, November 16.
For Debicki, furthermore, playing Diana was a way to honor such a beloved person: “I really cried when he died and I cried when I saw him on the screen.” For Abdalla, it also has an added value: that after 26 years of Dodi's death, people will finally understand the producer of Chariots of Fire a little better, until now always described as the son of the Harrods businessman, Mohamed. Al-Fayed, or as Diana Spencer's last boyfriend.
Diana's death, however, will not be the last we will see of Debicki in The Crown since, as was announced in the press, screenwriter Peter Morgan incorporates the character after death, in the form of a presence with which characters like the then Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth, played by Dominic West and Imelda Staunton.
Four episodes of the final season of The Crown premiere this Thursday and the remaining six will be available on December 14.
