In the 12 years that she has been working as a professional actress since, barely out of the conservatory, she made her debut with a small role in the Australian film A Death Wedding, in the tall Elizabeth Debicki - 1.90 ago meters – many amazing things have happened to him. It's not easy to beat the fact that legendary director Baz Luhrmanli employed Leonardo DiCaprio in The Great Gatsby.
However, this actress born in Paris, daughter of a Pole and an Australian, says without a doubt that the experience of playing Princess Diana in The crown has been incomparable: "Playing someone like that has been truly beautiful. It's something I will miss", he says in a press conference organized by Netflix. And he adds: "Diana has taught me a lot as a human being. The way he lived his life had to do with an ethic of love. It was something that lit her up. She loved people and was genuine, she had no hidden expectations or plans."
Debicki was added to the fifth season of the series created by Peter Morgan replacing Emma Corrin. In the first four episodes, Elizabeth has to face a new challenge: to show Diana's last months. "Recording the sixth season was a very different process for me compared to the fifth", the actress points out, and explains: "My first episodes in the series were a cerebral experience. There was an accumulation of all the research I had done in the previous year and when I started filming I had to put all the pieces together and at the same time be sure of what I was doing. But when we were about to start filming season six I thought I'd try to do something different. I decided to trust myself and let myself go. My gut told me that everything I had learned was still there and I had deepened it. I realized that I didn't need to think so much, that I could just be Diana."
, who won the Golden Globe for playing the younger Diana. Although Debicki also received a nomination for that award for the fifth season, she lost to Julia Garner for Ozark, and is a candidate for the Emmy that will be presented in January.
Considering the results, the method worked: “On the first day of shooting the new season, we did the scene where I wake up my children. And it was one of the strangest experiences I had as an actress, because just by saying action she was there. When I found this to be the case, I simply surrendered. This gave me a lot of freedom to interpret it", he confesses.
Just as for the fifth season he read everything he could find about Diana and talked to a lot of people who had known her, to try to understand what it was like to be in her shoes, in those dramatic months from 1997 he had enough by examining another type of material: "Since they were being chased by the paparazzi there is a lot of filming. It helped me to see his body language. It was very unusual to be able to have a tool like this. You can see the intimacy between them, despite all the pressure they were under. You can see a great connection and a lot of sweetness", he says.
Debicki, who is now 33 years old, three years younger than Diana was when she died, says her tragic death is a reminder of how dangerous fame can be: "What happened to Diana is a story with a lesson , but the most extreme and tragic version you can imagine", he summarizes, then theorizes: "Celebrity is a strange concept, because it becomes a palpable reality that can be horrifying for certain people. Fame is something that is not well understood, because from the outside it can have a certain appeal, as it opens doors. It's something we think we want. But the most precious thing in life is your privacy, being able to love those you love without having witnesses".
Although she is 11 centimeters taller than Diana, and doesn't look that much like her physically, Debicki admits that her connection with her has been particularly strong: “I still haven't been able to leave the role. I feel that she is still in my body. I guess when the world sees my work it will be easier to let it go. It was a very visceral interpretation and, thinking about it, I'm not sure I want to let him go either," she reveals.
