The Crown was given access to rarely-seen footage of Princess Diana for season 6 details

Virgin Radio

31 Oct 2023, 14:06

Fans are preparing to have their hearts broken again for the sixth and final season of The Crown.

It has emerged that the showrunners were given access to rarely-seen footage of Princess Diana.

The last series will dramatise the tragic death of the Princess of Wales.

It has been confirmed that the horrific crash itself won't be shown, but the days before and after will be shown.

The Crown has been scheduled for a November release, and will cover the 1997 events.

In a new interview with Deadline, filmmaker Christian Schwochow revealed he had access to rarely-seen footage of Princess Diana.

He said they were granted access to CCTV footage gathered from the Ritz hotel in Paris, where Diana and her partner, Dodi Fayed, had dined earlier in the night of their final evening.

"We could make our own observations about the physicality between Dodi and Diana," he said. "We couldn't hear anything, but we could see how they touched, how they laughed. And even though we knew she had been crying in the restaurant, we could really observe and see how much they felt at ease and how comfortable she was."

He says there are "so many moments of sadness and grief," in the new series.

"I don't know how many times I had to cry behind my monitors because it's so incredibly intense to recreate these moments," he said.

"Not only to recreate them, but to create our truth, which is hopefully as truthful as you can get in fiction."

Producer Suzanne Mackie said: "The show might be big and noisy, but we're not. We're thoughtful people and we're sensitive people," she said.

"And so there was a very, very careful, long, long, long conversation about how we do it – and I hope, you know, the audience will judge it in the end, but I think it's been delicately, thoughtfully recreated."

Elizabeth Debicki, who portrays Diana, said: "I think it's a really unique challenge as an actor, to portray those days. I really just trusted in Peter's [creator Peter Morgan] emotional blueprint that he created for us to follow. It's his interpretation and I think it made emotional sense to me, so I clung to that. Because, obviously, it's devastating and it's fraught and we can never know."