He thought he had it out. “Well, I did, because I didn’t get the part,” she deadpans. However, The Crown creator Peter Morgan spotted something else. “Obviously they saw something Diana-ish in my audition, which wasn’t really what I was going for at the time.” Her agent called her and asked if she would be interested in playing Diana at some point in the future. She put it in the back of her mind, where it hid until a few years ago. Then he got the call. “It was much more formal, are you going to play this role?” He had a lot of time to think about it. She said yes. Debicki lives in London, but we’re talking via video call as she’s in Mallorca filming the sixth and reportedly final season of The Crown. She has come to my rescue, giving me clear instructions on how to maximize windows, which she finds funny since she’s usually the one who needs technical support. “Any technology I use runs on some ancient program. People open it and say, why is this from 2004? Why do you have 874 unread emails?” She picks up her phone and shows me her email app. That’s actually 23,460 unread emails. This is embarrassing! “It’s completely, utterly infuriating,” he smiles. She has friends who, when they meet her for coffee, open her phone to delete some of her messages. This is a rare day for her and she feels tired. It’s easy to see why. much of The Crown’s fifth season is Diana-heavy, dealing with the eventual breakdown of her marriage to Prince (now King) Charles. We talk for almost an hour and a half, and she is wonderfully agitated. She puts on her glasses and takes them off. She wears her hair up, down, up and down. She scratches her forehead, her nose, touches her mouth, her face, always moving, a little. This is all the more impressive because most of her characters, from Jed in The Night Manager to Kat in Tenet, are glacially calm, royally dark, almost locked in their own grief. One of the reasons she’s not often recognized on the street, she suspects, is because she doesn’t look much like her off-duty characters, and in The Crown’s case that’s certainly true. Even after two years of filming, her long, straight blonde hair was a surprise to one of the makeup artists on set, who had assumed that Diana’s hair was real and that Debicki’s real hair was a wig. “At least we’re selling it,” he says. On set someone went, Oh my God, you’re so like her! I’m gone, I don’t do it anymore. Where is the line? I have lost the line He has a dry sense of humor. He turns the camera around briefly to show me the small apartment he’s been calling home for the past few weeks. The cast was in Barcelona but postponed filming when the Queen died, as a mark of respect. she is ready to go back to watch these scenes again. It’s a charming, sunny room that doesn’t give anything away, not entirely unlike its current occupant. “It looks something like this,” he says, pausing to point to a giant clock face on the wall above the couch. “I’m really confused as to why the clock is so big. Also not working but still ringing. Which is basically me.” If self-deprecation is Australian, then Paris-born, Melbourne-raised Debicki does her best to uphold the national stereotype. As Diana, with Dominic West as Charles, in The Crown. Photo: Keith Bernstein/Netflix/PA After a decade as an actor, the 32-year-old seems, on the surface, to be breaking it. Her first job, straight out of acting school in Melbourne, was in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. He stole the show from Tom Hiddleston’s bottom in the BBC spy thriller The Night Manager, had a stint with Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert, more TV, more film, then moved into the blockbuster era, starring in Christopher’s confusing Tenet Nolan, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 and now has the most talked about role in the most talked about TV series of the moment. After all this, is she starting to feel more secure in her success? “Mmmm,” he says. “Yes and NO. We’re still waiting for that big penny to drop.” She knows what her career looks like on paper. “Like a linear, upward journey? But for many reasons, I’m not one to take anything for granted. Not too long ago, I remember leaving a big movie set and thinking, well, if this is the last one, I’m glad I got to do it.” Where does this doubt come from? A few places, he thinks. Part of it is just the nature of the business, and part of it may be that Australian thing again, which gave her the feeling that even getting a job in the first place meant she was one of the lucky ones. “It seemed like a big leap [to leave Australia] When I was younger. Maybe that’s ingrained in my psyche.” If the penny hasn’t dropped yet, it certainly is, with The Crown, about to drop with a thud. Was she ever reluctant to join his circus, knowing that Diana is such a sensitive role and, inevitably, her role in it will be heavily scrutinized? “No, I wasn’t,” he says firmly. “I went on instinct and didn’t think much of it. I have watched and loved this show for years. I knew I was getting to work with people who were extremely smart and very sensitive about how they scripted and made decisions. So I never felt like I was jumping on shaky ground.” “When I go to Sainsbury’s, will it be weird?” Photo: Hollie Fernando/The Guardian. Dress: By Malene Birger The stable ground of the Crown includes a huge research department, which helped Debicki in her preparation. When she was officially chosen in 2020, she asked for “everything. And when I got it all, I remember thinking, well, that’s a lot of research.” I ask if she talked to Emma Corrin, who played Diana in season four, from age 16 to 28 (Debicki picks up the story a few months later). “I absorbed the show. I learned from that,” he says. But it was the scripts that brought it all into focus. “Suddenly what seems like a vast field of information is very quickly limited, extremely limited to existing within the context that Peter [Morgan] has built for you. It was a huge relief. I remember thinking, now my responsibility is to bring to life what he has written and his interpretation of these events and these people.” Then, he says, it’s like playing any other character. There are layers to peel or stack. “The physical, how they look, how they dress…” It’s weird that I’m always on a yacht. Maybe the casting universe was like, you know what? Gives a good boat Debicki blinks slowly, tilts her head down and looks up, her eyes at a very familiar angle. Hold on, I say. Are you doing it now? Is that a blinking Diana? He smiles, though I suspect it’s more out of patience than agreement. “You know, I was doing something the other day on set and someone went, Oh my God, you’re so like her! And I went, I don’t do it anymore. Where is the line? I’ve lost the line,” he jokes. “But that’s understandable, because I’ve been at it for a long time.” Externally, however, the disputes continue. The Crown reached the 90s, the decade of the annus horribilis, the divorces, Diana’s infamous interview with Martin Bashir. Many of those depicted are still alive. John Major, played by Jonny Lee Miller, has complained that some aspects of the show are “nonsense”, such as the depiction of a secret meeting between the then prime minister and Charles, in which Charles hints that he has doubts. on whether the monarchy is in “safe hands”. On the morning Debicki and I speak, Dame Judi Dench has hit the headlines with a letter to The Times, calling the show “grossly unfair to individuals and damaging to the institution they represent”. With Tom Hiddleston in The Night Manager … Photo: Des Willie … and as Ayesha in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 2. Photo: © Marvel Studios 2017 Debicki is well prepared for this line of questioning. Does she feel defensive about it? “I really don’t,” he says calmly. “I understand what the show is about and what it’s trying to do. I also understand the reaction to this. I think this is a time period that has been told many times and will continue to be told, and I know the level of care and respect that people put into these stories.” She says that in her opinion, it is a TV drama, based on real events. “I mean, it’s clearly fantastic. I feel like the audience knows that, because there are actors playing roles. I never watched The Crown and thought this is a documentary or this is obviously true.” Even so, shortly after we speak, Dench gets a win. season five will include a new “fictional dramatization” disclaimer. Recent paparazzi photos showed Debicki, as Diana, filming on a yacht. This level of attention seems like a shift for the actor who, he says, is more used to flying under the radar. Has she noticed him walking in? “No, but I’m not going anywhere,” he says. “The show supports me a lot. I think that lead up to the show coming out, and then people watching it, there’s a kind of energy that’s pretty heightened right now. Also,…
