‘The Crown’ Director’s Montage of Season 6 Clips About Princess Diana’s Death Brought Cast and Crew to Tears
The Crown Season 6 hasn’t even premiered, but it’s already had the cast — and crew — in tears. Actor Jonathan Pryce found he “could not stop crying” upon seeing a video montage of scenes from the series’ final installment about Princess Diana’s death. Pryce, who plays Prince Philip, wasn’t the only one getting emotional over the video. So was director Christian Schwochow.
‘The Crown’ Season 6 doesn’t show the car crash that killed Diana
The moment of the 1997 car crash in Paris, France, that took the lives of Diana, Dodi Fayed, and Henri Paul — and spared a former bodyguard — is not depicted in The Crown Season 6. Instead, the production team behind the award-winning series handled it very carefully.
“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.”
Jonathan Pryce felt as if he were ‘reliving’ the hours after Princess Diana’s death watching the season 6 clips
In a recently released Netflix interview conducted prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike, the cast of The Crown discussed season 6. Per the Daily Mail, Pryce, who plays Prince Philip, admitted to being brought to tears watching footage Schwochow pieced together for the cast to see about Diana’s death.
Pryce said he “could not stop crying,” and he wasn’t alone. “Neither could the cameraman who’d filmed it or the director who’d shot it,” he shared.
“It was an extraordinary moment,” the actor added, saying it felt like “reliving waking up and listening to the radio.”
That wasn’t the only moment of tears on set of The Crown Season 6. Filming the final episodes involved “so many moments of sadness and grief,” according to Schwochow. “I don’t know how many times I had to cry behind my monitors because it’s so incredibly intense to re-create these moments. Not only to re-create them but to create our truth, which is hopefully as truthful as you can get in fiction.”
Elizabeth Debicki called filming the last scenes before Diana’s death ‘heavy and very manic’
Pryce’s co-star, Debicki, who has played Diana since season 5, opened up about filming her character’s final in the same interview. Recalling filming Diana’s last hours in Paris on Aug. 31, 1997, as paparazzi followed her and Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla), Debicki described it as “heavy and very manic, and incredibly invasive.”
“It was difficult to recreate,” she told Netflix. “At times, it’s almost like an animalistic response to being pursued by that many actors playing the press. Because there’s nowhere you can go, and you only have to be in a situation like that for about a minute before you realize this is completely unbearable.”
“There was not a huge amount of acting taking place,” Debicki continued. “I think that was what was happening a lot when we were recreating those scenes, because it’s really horrendous to have that many people yelling at you and wanting something. So we let it happen. Because it feels like a very important part of the story to tell.”
“No one should ever be having to experience what it feels like to try and get the scenes in the daytime in Paris,” she added. “Trying to get from one place to another, and to have this swarm around you. You feel very trapped. It’s a really unpleasant experience.”
The Crown Season 6 premieres in two parts. Part I, which chronicles the lead-up to Diana’s death, drops on Nov. 16, 2023, with episodes 1-4. Part II on Dec. 14, 2023, with episodes 5-10, charting the years after, ending with 2005.
