The sixth and final season of The Crown brings heartbreak

One of the biggest moments in history is set to play out on screen when The Crown resumes for its final season.

The tragic and untimely death of Princess Diana in 1997 remains one of the rare moments in which the entire Commonwealth, and much of the world, grieved as one.

As the series concludes sixty award-winning hours of the Royal story and its most ambitious chapter yet, they do so with consideration and respect for Diana and Queen Elizabeth II who passed away in 2022.

Imelda Staunton, who continues the role of Her Majesty from season five (Claire Foy and Olivia Williams played the role previously), confesses that the atmosphere on set was “quite difficult” at times upon hearing the news.

“We [the cast and crew] carried on with as much dignity and grace as they have always done on The Crown but, obviously, there was a very different temperature in the world, in England and even more so on The Crown,” Imelda, 67, says. “We knew we couldn’t do anything differently and I had to carry on, but we were all a wee bit sad and that probably informed our temperature.”

The season, which is split into two parts, begins with Prince Charles (Dominic West) and Princess Diana (Aussie star Elizabeth Debicki) sharing very different holidays with their sons during their first summer as a divorced couple.

Diana, William (Rufus Kampa) and Harry (Fflyn Edwards) are on a luxury yacht in the South of France with the smitten Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) before the boys return to Charles in Balmoral and paparazzi aggressively follow Diana and Dodi to Paris.

TV WEEK spoke with costume designer Sidonie Roberts, set decorator Alison Harvey, hair and makeup designer Cate Hall and movement coach Polly Bennett on what it took to tell this devastating chapter of the story, as well as Elizabeth Debicki and Imelda Staunton, who were interviewed before the SAG strike.

The Princess Mum

Movement coach Polly Bennett says she made up games and exercises to create a closeness between Elizabeth Debicki and the actors who play her sons, Prince William (Rufus Kampa and Ed McVey) and Prince Harry (Fflyn Edwards and Luther Ford).

“We don’t have huge amounts of documentation about how they spent time together, so we had to imagine into the private life of those characters,” Elizabeth, 33, adds. “It became about sharing electric currents between their bodies to make it feel tangible they’d spent a lot of time together and this wasn’t just the boys spending time with a famous actress.”

Elizabeth admits she was initially nervous about finding that familial chemistry. “The boys were much smarter than me and funny and kind and very connected to each other. I just desperately wanted them to love me and that was pretty much what was happening on screen as well,” she says. “I often felt much less mature than Rufus and so Fflyn and I had that natural dynamic like a terrible buddy duo, teaming up on him.”

Swimming in memories

Costumer Sidonie Roberts says when it came time to recreate some of the most famous outfits from Diana’s holiday, they went for authenticity. “We thought, ‘we all know these swimsuits, we’ve seen them in photos for years’, so we just reached out to Gottex, the company that made them for Diana at the time, and they very generously made us three out of five of her suits and that took some pressure off.”

Elizabeth says such attention to detail really helped her embrace the role in that moment. “I really loved the blue swimsuit that Diana wears when she walks out to the end of the diving board and sits down,” she says. “There was just something about that swimsuit and recreating that moment that felt very sacred and important, so we wanted to get it right.”

Sets at sea

In a major departure for the show, large sequences of the first four episodes were shot on a luxury yacht rented in Mallorca, Spain. “It was enormous and kind of outrageous and exactly what the story needed,” Debicki reflects. “I was just really happy to get away from England and have time with the kids and a breather. We didn’t take it for granted that we were able to escape the gray of London for a while.”

Set decorator Alison Harvey says new challenges were presented when they had to transform the yacht into the home-at-sea of Egyptian billionaire Mohamed al-Fayed. “We had to interpret what we could pull off in such a short space of time in terms of the fabrics, the designs, the art pieces and the patterns of the era to pay homage to the Fayeed’s Egyptian heritage,” she says. “It was great being able to actually film on a lovely big yacht, but we still had to turn it into something fit for a Princess.”

Putting on the Ritz

Alison also admits she was especially emotional after painstakingly building an exact replica of the interior of Paris’s Ritz Hotel on a London soundstage, the much-documented site of final security footage photos of Diana and Dodi waiting to get in their car before the crash. “I found The Ritz set extraordinary and very moving,” she adds, “maybe because we know what story piece is going to take place there as well.”

Wigs ahoy

Hair and makeup designer Cate Hall says the wigs were always essential in capturing the characters. “Almost everybody in terms of principle cast has a wig, so most have between three and six wigs and each is commissioned way in advance of shooting,” she explains. “It’s quite an archaic process where we have an actor at the wig house, and we wrap their head in clear film and surround it with tape to make an accurate head shape and then we draw on the hairline with a Sharpie and choose loads of different colors from hair samples and make it three dimensional and then they come back and wear it while we trim the hair and sculpt it into something that ends up looking right.”

Cate also revealed some scenes called for the wigs to be ditched too. “One of the biggest challenges was replicating Diana’s relaxed moments where she’s just with the boys, on holiday on the yacht and being a mum,” she says. “Our visual language with hair and makeup usually starts with the shape of the wig that says, ‘this is Diana’, but when you don’t have that because she’s just got out of the water after a swim or her hair is messed up, it’s quite tricky.”