Playing Diana was scariest role of my life but latest part is perfect tonic, says Elizabeth Debicki ahead of TV Baftas

AT tonight’s Bafta TV awards, Elizabeth Debicki is expected to pick up yet another gong for her portrayal of Princess Diana in Netflix smash The Crown.

That is not bad going, considering the Australian actress was initially plagued with “extreme terror” at the prospect of taking on the iconic role.

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Elizabeth, who has already won a hat-trick of Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and Critics’ Choice awards, revealed: “It was really the strangest job of my life to date, without a doubt.

“It all happened within a swamp of terror as well, like a swamp of extreme terror that was linked to a sense of responsibility.”

The part catapulted the 33-year-old to worldwide fame, and this week the 6ft 3in actress walked down the red carpet at the Met Gala in a Rapunzel-inspired gold Dior gown.

This summer she starts work on romantic thriller Andorra and sci-fi drama This Blue Is Mine after making her horror movie debut in MaXXXine, out in July.

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She said of the slasher flick, which is set in Hollywood during the Eighties and stars Mia Goth as a porn star stalked by a mystery killer: “I needed to do something very different.

“Would you like to play an Eighties film director with massive leather shoulder pads? Yes!

“It couldn’t be more different in tone than what I had been doing for a year on The Crown.

“It was sort of like a balm to me as an actor, like a tonic, to go into ­something completely different. I just had a ball.”

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Elizabeth was born in Paris to a Polish father and Australian-Irish mother. The family moved to the outskirts of Melbourne when Elizabeth was five.

Like her parents, who met while performing in the ballet together, Elizabeth trained as a dancer.

She switched to acting as a teenager, later joking that she was taller than her dance teachers.

While Elizabeth now embraces her striking frame, she says she grew up “wishing I was shorter”.

Her height was noticed by her school’s basketball team coach but she was so bad they “benched me for the whole game”.

And it can still cause issues on film sets when working with her shorter co-stars.

She said: “I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of actors who very graciously stand on apple boxes to do love scenes.

“It certainly takes the romance out of it.”

Elizabeth landed her first role — a bit part in 2011 Aussie film A Few Best Men — shortly after graduating from drama school.

That fleeting appearance prompted Moulin Rouge movie director Baz Luhrmann, 61, to personally fly Elizabeth to Los Angeles to screen test for The Great Gatsby.

She was cast as Jordan Baker in that 2013 film, starring alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in what became her breakout role.

That was followed in 2015 by a villainous turn in Guy Ritchie’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E., beating Charlize Theron, 48, and Rose Byrne, 44, to the femme fatale role.

The movie required Elizabeth to develop a new skill — driving a car.

She said: “That was very stressful. I actually got driving lessons on the set, which was quite hilarious, in a manual E-Type Jag. That car was so beautiful and it was slightly lost on me being a non-driver.”

‘Actors stand on boxes for scenes with me’

But it was her part in smash-hit BBC series The Night Manager, in 2016, that established Elizabeth as a household name in the UK.

Playing bombshell Jemima “Jed” Marshall, her chemistry with co-star Tom Hiddleston, 43, prompted speculation that the pair were dating in real life.

She even described the actor as “basically perfect” — but shortly after the show, Tom was confirmed to be in a relationship with his now-fiancée, Zawe Ashton, 39.

Elizabeth keeps much of her private life under wraps, although she officially stepped out with her low-profile partner Kristian Rasmussen for the first time at the series five launch of The Crown in London in November 2022.

She also thanked him in an acceptance speech after winning Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor at this year’s SAG Awards

Elizabeth has been humbled by all the acclaim and awards she has won for playing Diana.

She said: “To have the work you do seen and to have people care about it is something I will never take for granted.

“Even doing awards ceremonies — that’s so new to me as an actor. You just never know.”

Playing the princess was clearly a formative experience for the actress.

Growing up in the Melbourne suburbs, she recalls her mum’s reaction to Diana’s death.

Elizabeth said: “I remember my mother’s reaction very, very strongly.

“I remember sitting on the floor of our living room, and my mother was watching the funeral procession and she was weeping. I didn’t understand what was going on and she explained to me who this person was.

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“It’s actually quite a strong core memory.

“Knowing that this woman influenced my mother, a woman in

Australia in the suburbs, so deeply is something that was already sort of embedded into my understanding of the story.”

To do the role justice, Elizabeth studied archive footage of the late princess, obsessing over the nuances of Diana’s demeanour.

She added: “I read a lot and I watched a lot.

“There’s this enormous amount of material available that the research departments give to you.

“I was super-nervous and keen, so I was like, ‘I want all of it’. Then, of course, it lands on my doorstep and it’s literally just like volumes and volumes and archival boxes that you could spend 20 hours watching and you wouldn’t get through it.

“One of the things I learnt very quickly was I couldn’t really read anything people had written about her.

“I’d get halfway through a book and then pull and go, ‘Well, you don’t know that’.

“So the things that I started looking for were the most raw versions of footage I could get, which is usually sort of uncut newsreels.

“I was like a crazy person watching somebody get out of a car 75 times.”

One of the scenes that Elizabeth applied her forensic approach to was the now-infamous 1995 Panorama interview Diana gave to Martin Bashir — who, in an independent 2021 inquiry, was found to have deceitfully gained the princess’s trust.

‘I watched someone get out of a car 75 times’

She said: “Panorama was a really wild thing to do.

“The real tragedy of the interview, as far as I can tell, is it was really the catalyst for her being separated from the Royal Family and losing protection, which left her in the incredibly vulnerable state she was in at the end of her life.

“Then we learn that there was this enormous manipulation that happened.

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“It was certainly obvious to anyone who’s looking that there was an enormous amount of paranoia,  she was deeply manipulated into it.

“I watched it 100,000 times. I learnt that I had to watch it, but then I learnt that I had to just listen to it, because she’s performing something as well.”

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