This Actor From ‘The Crown’ Walked the Site of Princess Diana’s Car Crash — and It Wasn’t Elizabeth Debicki
The sixth and final season of The Crown charts Princess Diana’s death, and one actor found themselves at the scene of the car crash, the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris, France, where on Aug. 31, 1997, Diana, as well as Dodi Fayed and their driver, died. However, it wasn’t Elizabeth Debicki, the actor who reprised her role as Diana in The Crown Season 6, who followed the car’s “trajectory” through the tunnel. It was her co-star and on-screen love interest, Khalid Abdalla.
Khalid Abdalla visited the site of the car crash to get a better understanding of what happened
In an interview released in the lead-up to the premiere of The Crown’s final season, Abdalla, along with other cast members, sat down with Netflix. Apart from Debicki, who has played Diana since season 5, and Jonathan Pryce (Prince Philip) opening up about heightened emotions during filming, Abdalla shared he visited the scene of the 1997 crash.
“There are all sorts of things that I have understood about the geography of what happened on that day that I didn’t understand before doing this,” Abdalla said (via Daily Mail). “Or until doing what I did as I walked the entire trajectory of the car down to the Alma tunnel, back and forward, to understand it.”
“It’s a huge responsibility,” he added. And I hope audiences, when they see it, feel that we have done it right and honored how sensitive it is.”
‘The Crown’ Season 6 doesn’t show the moment of the car crash that killed Diana, Fayed, and Henri Paul
The moment of the 1997 car crash that took the lives of Diana, Dodi Fayed, and Henri Paul — and spared a former bodyguard — will not depicted in The Crown Season 6. Rather, Netflix and those behind the series have said they “delicately recreated” Diana’s death.
“We did film Diana, but very respectfully — not in a big close-up,” Christian Schwochow, director of The Crown Season 6, told Deadline. “This enabled Dominic West to perform his scenes as her former husband Prince Charles at the hospital.”
“It was very, very clear to us that we don’t want to see her dead body,” the director said. “I actually think that it was not a discussion. Not even in the first version of the cut we would ever see her body.”
Harry drove through the Alma Tunnel in 2007 to see where Princess Diana died
Besides revisiting memories of Diana’s funeral and the moment he learned of his mother’s death from his father, King Charles III, Prince Harry also revealed in Spare, his January 2023 memoir, that he once retraced Diana’s final steps.
“Off we went, weaving through traffic, cruising past the Ritz, where Mummy had her last meal with her boyfriend that August night,” the Duke of Sussex wrote. “Then we came to the mouth of the tunnel. We zipped ahead and went over the lip at the tunnel’s entrance, the bump that supposedly sent Mummy’s Mercedes veering off course. But the lip was nothing. We barely felt it.”
Harry visited the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, where the car carrying his mother hit the 13th pillar, in October 2007 while in Paris for the Rugby World Cup semi-final. Explaining his reaction to seeing the tunnel, Harry shared it didn’t look dangerous.
“Just a straight tunnel. I’d always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway,” Harry said. “Inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel. No reason anyone should ever die inside it.”
Season 6, unlike previous installments of The Crown, premieres on Netflix in two parts. Part I drops on Nov. 16, consisting of episodes 1-4. Part II hits the streamer on Dec. 14 with episodes 5-10.
