This is Elizabeth Debicki, the new Lady Di from ‘The Crown’ whom Andrew Morton described as “disturbing”
The actress, who was born in Paris and raised in Australia, became known in Baz Luhrmann’s ‘The Great Gastby’, and has participated in ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ and ‘Tenet’. She admits that wearing Diana of Wales’s ‘revenge dress’ was a lot of pressure.
In the fifth season of The Crown , it is sometimes hard not to believe that the one who is appearing on the screen is the real Lady Di. The person in charge of this optical game is Elizabeth Debicki, the new sensation of the Netflix series about the British monarchy. This 32-year-old Australian plays Diana from Wales in her last years and succeeds the British Emma Corrin in her role, who went from being an almost unknown actress to dominating covers. Debicki’s case is different: she had already filmed with famous directors such as Baz Luhrmann (The Great Gastby, along with Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan), Christopher Nolan (Tenet, with Robert Pattinson) or Steve McQueen (in Widows,where he worked with Viola Davids and Michelle Rodriguez) and has even been part of the Marvel universe (as part of the cast of Guardians of the Galaxy 2). But, despite her rising acting career, Debicki has always protected her privacy with her own zeal and it is now that she faces, like the ‘people’s princess’ she plays in The Crown, the media exposure.
«I have always been a reserved person. I feel that what I want the world to know is my work and I have always believed that me and my work are two different things. I think that people, with social networks, can blur [that barrier] very well, and I respect that, but it’s not who I am, I just want my work to speak for me and for people to receive it without anything interfering with it. », He explained in 2018 in an interview published in the Australian edition of Vogue coinciding with the premiere of A Masterpiece,film in which he worked with Mick Jagger. The brushstrokes that she herself has made known have transcended her private life: she was born in Paris in 1990, but when she was only five years old her parents moved to Melbourne (Australia), where she grew up in a European-style environment that clashed with the from other children his age. Both her mother and her father were dancers (he, of Polish origin and she, Australian of Irish descent) and she would have liked to study history, but acting got in her way and she trained at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Elizabeth Debicki, as Lady Di, in the series, with the fictional interpretation of the famous ‘revenge dress.
In 2011, when she had just graduated, the Australian director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge, Romeo + Juliet) took an interest in her and two years later she participated in his adaptation of The Great Gastby, a great production with a cast full of Hollywood stars. Debicki played the flapper Jordan Baker with a black wig with a twenties-style haircut and drew attention for her presence: the actress is 1.90, a height that, she has admitted, has never been a problem for her . In fact, at The CrownIt is appreciated that she is taller than Dominik West, an actor in charge of interpreting her husband, the Prince of Wales (now King Carlos III), who measures 1.83. After the debut with Luhrmann in 2013, the projects have been happening for the Australian, but she has preferred to remain oblivious to fame for now: she lives in London although she considers herself “a nomad”, the only social networks with her name are created by his followers, and little is lavished on public events.
As an exception to his low profile, his relationship with the world of fashion can be pointed out. At the end of last year, WWD published the exclusive that the actress became an ambassador for Dior Jewelery. Her relationship with her house is very close, she has attended shows invited by the firm’s creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, and she often wears her models on the red carpet . In fact, she in the presentation of The CrownIn London on November 8, she posed in a black Dior dress that took 300 hours to make and was full of nods to Lady Di: on the one hand, it was reminiscent of the famous ‘revenge dress’ designed by Christina Stambolian that the Princess of Wales wore in 1994, when her husband’s infidelity became public, and on the other it was inspired by the sky blue evening dress designed by Catherine Walker that Diana wore at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival.
In the new season of The Crown , the wardrobe once again has a central role. And one of the absolute protagonists, due to the symbolism it had at the time, is the famous revenge dress that the princess wore to dinner at the Serpentine Gallery in London the same night that a televised interview was broadcast in which her husband He recognized his infidelity. “The revenge dress was a lot of pressure,” Debicki acknowledged in a recent interview with the British edition of Vogue,that he has chosen her as the image of one of his covers for the month of December, dedicated to the most outstanding female faces of current fiction. “It is a complex dress. I let the trials roll around me as I thought about what that dress meant. Why that dress? [Lady Di] she had had it for two or three years in her closet, it was super edgy at the time. She was demanding attention. The way he gets out of the car, his luminosity. It was something extraordinary to see. Deciding what you say about yourself through fashion”, has reflected the actress.
Five years ago, when she auditioned for a role in the second season of The Crown but was ultimately denied, the Australian didn’t think she would end up as one of the show’s leads. Now that she has become the center of attention, she shies away from controversy (Netflix has added a clarification stating that the series is a “fictional dramatization” after criticism from figures such as Judi Dench and John Major) and stresses that for her it is about one more paper “It’s clearly fiction. I feel like the audience knows it, because there are actors doing their parts. I have never seen The Crown thinking this is a documentary or it is real », she has assured her in an interview published on the occasion of the premiere in The Guardian .
For Andrew Morton, Diana’s biographer of Wales and author of Diana: Her True Story, Debicki’s performance is “disturbing.” He assures the writer to The Daily Beast that seeing her on her screen has been “like being back in her room with her 30 years ago.” Now it remains to be seen how the actress will face this new stage of her career and if she will be able to continue shielding her private life (in 2016, when she worked on the series The Infiltrator with Tom Hiddleston there were rumors that they were a couple, which were not confirmed). . What is clear is that she does not want to be pigeonholed as the new Lady Di: she has already recorded and the third installment of Guardians of the Galaxy is pending releasealongside Chris Pratt and Zoe Saldana and it has been announced that he will star with Ralph Fiennes in Farnsworth House. In this film, following in the wake of The Crown, she will play another real character, Edith Farnsworth, the wealthy doctor who commissioned the architect Mies van der Rohe in 1945 to build the revolutionary glass house that bears her last name.
