The Crown put a lot of thought into how Princess Diana‘s death would be portrayed.
“The show might be big and noisy, but we’re not. We’re thoughtful people, and we’re sensitive people. There were very careful, long conversations about how we were going to do it,” executive producers Andy Harries and Suzanne Mackie said at the Edinburgh TV Festival on Thursday, August 24, according to Deadline.
Harries and Mackie went on to praise Elizabeth Debicki for her performance as the late Princess of Wales.
“The audience will judge it in the end, but I think it’s been delicately, thoughtfully recreated,” they continued. “[Elizabeth] was so thoughtful and considerate. She loved Diana. There’s a huge amount of respect from us all, I hope that’s evident.”
Netflix confirmed earlier this year that Diana’s death won’t be shown on screen, saying in a statement, “The exact moment of the crash impact will not be shown.”
The Crown, which debuted on Netflix in 2016, is an anthology series based on the British royal family. Multiple actors have played royals such as Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, Princess Margaret, King Charles III and Princess Diana. Season 6 — which will be the show’s last — is expected to cover the beginning of Prince William and Princess Kate’s love story in college and Prince Harry‘s tumultuous time living in the public eye.
Before taking on their respective roles within the royal family, William, 41, and Harry, 38, mourned Diana’s death as teenagers. In August 1997, Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Al Fayed died following a fatal car accident in Paris. William was 15 and Harry was 12 years old when Diana passed away.
Earlier this year, Harry revealed that he spent the first 11 years after Diana’s death thinking it was a hoax.
“For a long time. I just refused to accept that she was gone. Part of [it was] she would never do this to us. But also, part of it maybe [felt like] this is all part of a plan,” he detailed during a 60 Minutes interview in January. “For a time [I believed she was alive] and then she would call us, and we would go and join her.”
According to the Duke of Sussex, “many years” went by before he accepted that his mother passed away, adding, “I had huge amounts of hope.” Harry, who stepped back from his royal duties with wife Meghan Markle in 2020, recalled the distance that formed between him and William amid their grief.
“For me, it was never a case of I don’t want to talk about it with you. I just don’t know how to talk about it,” he continued at the time. “I never, ever thought that maybe talking about it with my brother or with anybody else at that point would be therapeutic.”
