The Crown’s Elizabeth Debicki says she struggled to leave Diana’s mannerisms behind

The Crown actor Elizabeth Debicki took a long time to shake off the mannerisms of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, whom she portrayed in the award-winning Netflix series.

The 33-year-old Australian found herself imitating Diana “for a long while” after the filming of the series’ sixth and final season, she said.

“My voice changed quite a bit and I kind of had to consciously bring it back to my own voice where my voice wants to sit and also my own accent,” she told the US magazine People.

“I had to work so hard at getting the voice that I sort of ingrained it so deeply in myself that I had to unwind the wheel.”

She said she was “doing quite a lot of physical stuff as well” and would catch herself “doing a lot of head tilting”.

“Someone said to me, ‘I think you’re doing it when you’re trying to convince people something.’ If someone was like, ‘You can’t go that way.’ I [found] myself sort of saying, ‘Are you sure?’ And then I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m slipping into this.’”

“That has left me now, but I had to do it consciously,” she added.

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Debicki played Diana in the last two seasons of The Crown, and is nominated at the 2024 Emmys for outstanding supporting actress in a drama for her performance. The royal drama was recently nominated for 18 Emmy awards, including outstanding drama series, with Imelda Staunton and Dominic West also picking up nods for their roles.

Debicki had previously said she “spent about a year doing research” for the role.

She told People the most inspiring part about playing the royal was seeing the progression of Princess Diana’s charity work. “[The] activism sense of her life was something she really believed in, and she did so much work for so many causes that people weren’t really paying attention to,” said Debicki.

“She really put herself on the line to draw awareness around them ... You can take it for granted now, in a way that’s so much more common, and we have so many more platforms for that. But at the time it was so radical, and I think learning about how much she really personally did that work, that was very kind of fascinating and beautiful to learn about.”