A complete unknown, plucked from obscurity and thrust into the spotlight, her life changing forever as a result.
It’s not lost on Emma Corrin that this is as much a fitting description for her own situation as it is for the character she plays in her breakthrough role.
Emma’s life is about to be transformed, with millions of people around the world tuning in to the new series of The Crown, where she portrays the young Princess Diana.
The fourth season of Netflix’s drama about the inner workings of the royal family during the reign of Queen Elizabeth launches today and covers the period from the late ’70s, when Prince Charles, next in line to the throne, was still unmarried at 30, causing consternation within the Royal household. His too-good-to-be-true fairytale wedding with Lady Diana Spencer, a shy nursery school teacher 14 years his junior, proved to be exactly that, the cracks in their fragile marriage revealing themselves almost immediately.
Emma, a 24-year-old actor with just a handful of credits on her CV, is preparing for her anonymity to come to an end, with early reviews from the critics describing her turn as the People’s Princess “a tour-de-force”.
“I’m excited,” she smiled. “I know my life is changing a lot but it’s manageable – although it wouldn’t be if I didn’t have lovely people around me.
“It was certainly a huge amount of pressure when I got the part. I felt huge responsibility. People like Diana, Charles and The Queen are icons in a way that makes them incredibly untouchable and kind of unknowable.
“As an actor, to be asked to portray them is really daunting. You are constantly looking for a foothold into the character you are playing, something to relate to or empathise with. It can be very difficult.
“It was really only when I got the script I realised this is a fictional character I am playing – I’m playing The Crown’s version of Diana.”
Emma, daughter of a businessman and speech therapist, attended an independent school for girls in Surrey before graduating from Cambridge University. She appeared in an episode of ITV drama Grantchester, a handful of episodes of US series Pennywise and had a small role in British movie Misbehaviour, about the feminist attack on the 1970 Miss World competition, before she was chosen to play Diana.
Emma was working a part-time job when her agent called to tell her she had an off-camera script read-through for The Crown, to assist producers who were auditioning actors to play Camilla. Emma would read Diana’s lines and, while her agent told her it wasn’t an audition, the young actress turned up for the job as if it was, devouring books and articles on the princess in preparation.
Her diligence paid off, as producers spotted her potential and invited her back to audition for the Diana role, competing alongside hundreds of others. When she was later told she had been cast, her reaction was “just disbelief. I stood there speechless for quite a long time.
Emma wasn’t even two years old when Diana, just 36, died in 1997, so she has no memory of the princess but has always felt a connection to her because her own mother looks very similar to Diana – so much so that passers-by in the street would do a double take when they walked past.
Category: Articles & Interviews
Emma Corrin’s World “Exploded” When The Crown First Teased Her Role as Diana
The actress talks experiencing the Diana fandom and that tense final scene in Season 4.
It all started to sink in when the first trailer dropped. Emma Corrin, cast as Princess Diana in the highly anticipated new season of The Crown, was on a trip to the countryside with her best friend and a weak Internet connection when she received an email reminder: In about two hours, the first teaser of the season would debut. Though the montage shows only shots of Corrin from the back, never revealing her face, it marked the first official footage of the actress as Diana in the wildly popular Netflix series. Sure enough, when the clip premiered, pandemonium ensued.
“It was mental,” Corrin recalls to BAZAAR.com on a video call from London. “And the world just went crazy. The world exploded. My phone went absolutely haywire. It was mad.”
That much was expected from an award-winning series with 73 million worldwide viewers, now that it has finally brought in one of the most beloved women in all of history. Diana’s arrival to the show comes just 23 years after the tragic death of the real-life princess, whose funeral was watched by an estimated 2.5 billion people on television. In 2020, her legacy as a humanitarian, fashion icon, and celebrity still thrives—likely not only because of how widely she was adored, but also how intensely the public obsessed over her life. Ever since she started dating Prince Charles, Diana was at the center of unrelenting media attention, and by portraying her, Corrin is getting a tiny taste of it.
“I’m getting overlap,” she says of the fandom, “Because I think that the part is such that people have not let go of her yet.” Like Diana, Corrin was thrust into the spotlight. Despite past roles in the British series Grantchester and Epix’s Batman-inspired Pennyworth, she was relatively unknown; but this year, thanks to The Crown, she’s covered almost a dozen magazines and is now undoubtedly considered one of Hollywood’s rising stars. “There’s a parallel there with this stuff, with the trajectory that she experienced in terms of being catapulted into fame. And it’s very strange,” Corrin says.
The actress was cautious about the expectations for her long-awaited season. “I feel there’s so much hype. It was probably just in my head, but I’m always wary of a lot of hype, because I’m worried of not living up to it.” But there was no need to worry: Critics praised the fourth season as the show’s best yet.
Still, Corrin who was immersed in the theater scene while studying at Cambridge, prepared diligently. She devoured books, biographies, and documentaries about the princess. She even read through letters Diana wrote to her father-in-law, Prince Philip, in whom she found a kindred spirit. In the show, Corrin so accurately nails Diana’s soft-spoken delivery and telling glances that it’s surprising to see how animated and fast a talker she is in real life. On our Zoom call, she jokes and emotes with her hands, occasionally bending her knee to prop a foot on her couch while she’s listening and nodding intently. She’s traded in Diana’s feathery wig and ’80s attire for a slick ponytail and lavender sweater (fitting that she wears a shade of the regal color purple).
Ahead, Corrin discusses how Diana’s journey with the royal family plays out in The Crown, re-creating Diana and Charles’s romance with costar Josh O’Connor, and how being fed desserts prepared her for a big scene with Emerald Fennell’s Camilla Parker Bowles.
When she was offered the role of Princess Diana on the fourth season of the Netflix drama The Crown, Emma Corrin says she nearly blacked out. Her reaction felt somewhat predestined: More than two decades earlier, when Corrin was a toddler, her mother walked into a café in a London railway station, prompting several patrons to faint because she bore such a striking resemblance to the Princess of Wales, whose tragic death in a car accident had shocked the world just hours earlier. “I hesitate to tell that story because it almost sounds too insane to be true,” she says. “There’s this theme throughout my life of Diana cropping up. It doesn’t feel ordinary.”
As a student of education at Cambridge University, Corrin, now 24, devoured the first two seasons of The Crown, which introduced audiences to a young Queen Elizabeth as she assumed her place at the top of the British monarchy. While in school, she regularly starred in campus theater productions, and secured an agent shortly after graduation. In 2018, she was hired to read a few lines as Diana during a casting call for Camilla Parker Bowles (played in the series by Emerald Fennell), who famously rivalled Diana for the affection of Prince Charles. Corrin was told it wasn’t an audition, but she prepared anyway, watching the 2017 documentary Diana: In Her Own Words an estimated 15 times and rehearsing with her mother, who works as a speech therapist. “There were things I tried to emulate, like Diana’s head tilt and her voice. She had a very unique way of speaking,” she says. Six months later, Corrin was asked back for a chemistry read with Josh O’Connor, who plays young Prince Charles; Corrin landed the part on the spot. Over the course of ten episodes, she transforms with uncanny grace from Shy Di, swallowed up in a replica of that famous taffeta wedding gown and mooning over her ambivalent husband, to the more defiant People’s Princess of the late ’80s. “We filmed out of order, and the shift was constant,” she recalls. “Older Diana holds herself so well. The director would be like, ‘Emma, posture!’”
The pandemic forced the production to cut a planned trip to the Pyrenees that Corrin and O’Connor had been looking forward to for their final scene (different actors reprise their roles in future seasons), but it also gave Corrin time to recover from whooping cough, which she had battled for most of filming. She welcomed the rest. The role, and the attention that has followed, connected her with her real-life counterpart in new and unexpected ways. “This is the first time for me being in the public eye in a way that I’m very scared about,” she says via Zoom from her London flat. As a teenager in nearby Sevenoaks, Corrin once stood on The Mall in front of Buckingham Palace with a friend, waving a massive daffodil to celebrate the 2011 nuptials of Diana’s son, Prince William, and Kate Middleton. Now, she’s in the surreal position of portraying the prince’s beloved mother. “I feel a lot of responsibility,” she says. “I try not to think much about it. Otherwise, it does get overwhelming.”
Source: Interview Magazine
After learning she had gotten the part of Princess Diana on The Crown, Emma Corrin spent the next few days on preparations. She bought binders and notebooks and pens. She cued up a list of documentaries and lined up stacks of biographies. She made folders of archival photos. She listened to recordings of Diana’s voice over and over again. None of it felt all that useful. Here, she and her collaborators explain the details that made Diana click into place.
Fidgety Hands
The first thing that helped Corrin understand Diana was to read the scripts, which included references to the princess’s bulimia. This swiftly became the center of how Corrin conceived of her. She wanted to make sure the disorder wasn’t a tangential part of her life but something that shaped nearly every moment of her day. “If you’re trying to understand the psychology of a character and they’re going through that, it’s hugely essential to their experience.” It’s the kind of interior understanding that radiates outward into a physical portrayal. “I did something with my hands in a lot of scenes,” Corrin says. “You use your hand to make yourself sick, and her fingers on her right hand have become a source of anxiety for her. She will rub them together when she’s anxious, when she’s cross, when she’s emotional.”A Voluminous Fringe
Corrin studied the connection between Diana’s bangs (or, in the U.K., her “fringe”) and her posture in trying to nail down how she used her hair as both a shield and a veil. “It’s something that gave her some distance from the world,” Corrin says. “It’s a protective thing.” The way Diana looks out from under her hair is also playful, though. It’s both a barrier and an invitation. “It’s, Look at me; don’t look at me,” Corrin says. “It’s almost doll-like, kind of puppy dog,” says Cate Hall, The Crown’s hair and makeup designer. “It gets a bit naughty after a while.”
Netflix’s all-conquering royal spectacle The Crown returns, with the People’s Princess taking centre stage like never before. Jonathan Dean speaks to the young actor about her ‘sympathetic’ take on Diana
Emma Corrin plays Princess Diana in the new series of The Crown and, as such, there is one thing people want to know. What does the actor think Princes William and Harry will make of the show? “I can’t imagine,” says Corrin, treading cautiously. “I’m not going to say it doesn’t matter, because that would be ignorant. If someone made a programme about my grandma, who died last year, that would be difficult for me to watch.” But would she want Diana’s sons to see her portrayal? “I’d be interested to know what they think,” she admits. Not that she would relish the awkwardness of asking them herself. “If I ever saw them at a party, I’d probably leave!”Corrin plays the princess between the ages of 16 and 28, the years in which “England’s Rose” met Prince Charles, gave birth to the boys and found her private life becoming increasingly complicated. I meet the 24-year-old in Claridge’s, a place Diana visited often for official engagements. The actor – brunette, baggy jumper, large specs – had just done her GQ shoot. “A lot of latex,” she says, smiling – as the styling was as far away from Diana as possible.
The new series of The Crown, however, aims to get up close and personal with the People’s Princess. We know the icon: the writers attempt to unpick how that iconography came to be. Corrin will play Diana for one series only, with Elizabeth Debicki replacing her for series five and six, the ones in which she will do the landmine walk and meet Dodi Fayed. “It’s a shame,” says Corrin about her fleeting appearance in Netflix’s key show. “I’m sad about it. But I’ve moved on…”
We meet Diana before she was famous, when she is yet to enter the palace and is living in a flat share in Earl’s Court. “She has no idea what she’s getting involved with,” says Corrin. “And it was more exciting to play that, because you are showing sides of somebody people don’t know.” Towards the end of the series, especially on a 1989 visit to New York, Corrin played famous moments, but she liked the early scenes, “when her fashion sense was awful”.
‘I haven’t done it before because I’ve been in a relationship,’ says actor
Emma Corrin has opened up about her changing relationship with body hair and explained how she has been growing out her leg hair.
Speaking to Glamour, the actor, who plays Princess Diana in Netflix’s historical drama, The Crown, explained how she had wanted to grow it out for a while.
“I’ve been meaning to grow it for quite a few years, but I’m recently single,” she said.
“I haven’t done it before because I’ve been in a relationship and I guess I had been programmed to think that I should probably shave for the benefit of both parties. But f*** it – I don’t really want to shave! I realised, ‘why did I ever bother?’
“It’s been quite an underwhelming realisation of, there’s no drama in it. It’s just there. I’m hoping it’s on the path to becoming normal and it never has to be a thing you notice.”
Elsewhere in the inteview, Corrin revealed she was hospitalised while filming season four of The Crown.
The actor explained how they were filming in Spain at the time and she had been unwell for a while.
“I’m asthmatic and I had been ill for a while with a bad cough,” she recalled.
“I had to film a scene in a freezing-cold swimming pool, with the kids playing William and Harry.
“It was honestly the hardest scene to film because I was genuinely keeping myself alive treading water, and also keeping five-year-old ‘Harry’ alive, as we found out he couldn’t swim!”
Corrin explained how she and the rest of the cast were supposed to be flying back to the UK that night, so they went to a hospital to collect some antibiotics for her on the way to the airport.
“The doctors gave me an oxygen test and said, ‘We cannot let you go because your oxygen levels are so low,’ so I was hospitalised,” she added.
“I remember the nurses, figuring out what I was filming and saying, ‘We know you’re playing Princess Diana, would you like us to put a cardboard bag over your head so no one recognises who you are?’ in broken English!”
The new season of The Crown debuted on Netflix on 15 November.
Source: Independent UK
The reality of playing one of the most famous women of the 20th century set in for Emma Corrin one day on the streets of West London.
She was filming a scene for Season 4 of “The Crown” re-creating the early media frenzy around Princess Diana — nee Lady Diana Spencer — the bashful 19-year-old nursery school assistant who became the subject of insatiable public curiosity thanks to her burgeoning romance with Prince Charles.
Corrin, in character in a feathered blond wig, stepped out of Diana’s former building in Earl’s Court and was swarmed by extras clicking away on vintage cameras. But just beyond the actors pretending to be photographers was a throng of real-life paparazzi, there to get a shot of the young, unknown actress stepping into a career-making role as “the people’s princess,” a woman who redefined contemporary celebrity.
In that surreal moment, Corrin tried to seize on the advice that director Benjamin Caron had given her when she got the part.
“He took me aside and very helpfully said, ‘You and Diana are going through a very similar thing. You’re going to suddenly be in the public eye, in a role that everyone has had their eyes on,’ ” Corrin recalls. “ ‘You will be in the newspaper and you’ll be papped. Anything you feel about it, be it fear or excitement or nervousness, be aware of it because that’s exactly how she would have been feeling.’ ”
“God,” she continues, “he was so right.”
Corrin is speaking via video conference from a friend’s home in the English countryside, where she’s enjoying a few days of quiet before “The Crown” returns to Netflix on Sunday and beams her likeness into living rooms around the world. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, she’s sitting at her laptop wearing earbuds and a cozy sweater instead of strutting the red carpet in a couture gown. But she doesn’t know anything different: Prior to “The Crown,” the 24-year-old had only a few acting credits, the most notable a recurring part in the Batman prequel series “Pennyworth.”
In the new season of The Crown, the British rising star plays Princess Diana – here she shares her travel secrets
From her favourite secluded hotel in the middle of the Atlas Mountains to what it’s like to film in the Royal Suite at The Savoy, acress Emma Corrin shares with us her favourite places around the world.
Your favourite small and secret hotel?
‘I’m reluctant to give up the name of this secluded gem but as much as I want it all to myself, people should definitely know it’s out there. In the middle of the Atlas Mountains, about an hour outside of Marrakech, is a hotel called L’Amandier. It’s on a plateau so you get this 360-degree panorama of the verdant Ouirgane Valley, meaning when the sun sets in the evening you feel like you are being totally engulfed by it. There are some amazing walks you can go on right at the doorstep. One hike took us through lush pastures with grazing goats, across barren patches where the red soil scuffed our boots and through villages where gaggles of children would follow us. It’s a real slice of heaven. The silence wraps you up, as do the views and the smells – a truly wholesome experience of life in the Atlas.’One thing you have never told anyone about your travels?
‘As much as I love travelling with other people, I think there is something special about discovering new places on your own. These days we are constantly interacting – especially in my industry which is a very social one. I have found I really value time spent on my own and when you pair this with travel it’s a great combination. Take yourself off to a city you’ve never been to and just wander around aimlessly! Bliss.’Your favourite classic hotel?
‘While filming The Crown recently, we were lucky enough to use the Royal Suite of The Savoy, which was standing in for Diana’s hotel room from her New York trip in 1989. For someone who has lived in or around London most of my life I had shamefully never really registered the beauty and history of the Savoy – but, oh my gosh! I feel like they should open up the Royal Suite once a year just so people can appreciate the completely absurd view you get over the South Bank through these vast windows. It was very hard for any of us to concentrate when all we wanted to do was gawp at the scenery and take turns trying out the enormous bed.’A great little find away from the crowds?
‘I’m an absolute devotee of the Canopy & Stars website, which has quirky glamping destinations across the UK and Europe. Among my favourites was staying in a yurt in Somerset with a four-poster bed, a wood-burning stove and, most excitingly, a roll-top bath. With the ingredients from our welcome basket we made sausage stew on the open fire outside, then wrapped up in blankets and did some stargazing. Another gem was a converted horse-box in Wales which overlooked the Brecon Beacons. No phone signal, no Wi-Fi – everything you could wish for and also nothing you didn’t need.’The book that inspired you to travel?
‘Reading Olivia Laing always makes me want to escape. There is a fluidity to her narratives and an incisiveness to the way she writes about selfhood that makes me feel so dissatisfied with the stagnancy of day-to-day life. It inspires me to shake off my shackles and run away on my own for a bit, to rediscover myself. I am also a huge Murakami fan and had read his books devotedly for many years before ever making it to Japan. I went on a theatre tour at university, we toured Romeo and Juliet around Tokyo for a month and it was one of the best trips of my life. The city is unlike anything I had imagined, it is electric and you feel like if you blink you’ll miss something – it’s a complete sensory overload!’If you could have one feast right now?
‘I spent New Year in Venice in 2019 and one evening, on a friend’s recommendation, we wound our way through the backstreets to find Corte Sconta, a traditional fish restaurant with a little vine-covered courtyard at the back. The menu changes depending on the season and what has been caught that day, so the fish is always fresh and delicious. I would recommend the soft-shell crab and the scallops in particular but, honestly, it’s all so good. The atmosphere is also wonderfully low key and local, hardly any tourists know about it so it feels like a wholly authentic Venetian experience. I think the same family have been running it for two generations.’The film whose location blew you away?
‘When I was younger I was obsessed with A Room With A View and it has left me with a completely irrational love of Italy, especially Florence. I think it was watching Helena Bonham Carter’s character come of age in a city so steeped in history and romance, I always thought that if I spent time there it would be particularly defining for me. Before I went to university I worked in pubs and restaurants in order to save money to travel Italy on a history of art tour, despite the fact I am no artist! We went to Venice, Florence and Rome, and it was just as magical as I had thought. I would really recommend exploring cities such as these in the context of learning about their art, it defines them, so it was an amazing way to explore. Next up I want to live in Florence for a few months and fall in love there – I don’t ask for much.’The destination you’d most like to visit next?
‘I have family in Argentina whom I have never met, so I would love to see them. They run a stunning ranch out there, and to stay with them for a while would be a great opportunity to get to know the country and learn some of the language. Also, being a keen water-skier I’m always trying to find places where I can stay while keeping up that sport – any recommendations would be welcome!’A place you fell in love in?
‘Every summer from the age of 13 to 18 me, my mum and my two brothers would pile into the car and drive to the Limousin in France. We had friends from Scotland who owned a farm there and during the summer invited guests to stay in teepees on the farm. It was totally idyllic. They had about 10 children of all ages and there were two other families from the UK who also returned with us year after year. All in all, we were a 20-strong group of kids and we grew up together over those blissful summer weeks, inventing games and spinning bottles, sleeping under the stars and pulling pranks – we all fell in love and out of love repeatedly, and it taught us a huge amount about ourselves and each other.’Your washbag essentials?
‘My Foreo face brush, which is fantastic for cleansing skin while travelling. And I can’t go anywhere without Elizabeth Arden’s Eight Hour Cream to tackle dryness, especially on lips during flights. Scent is also important to me – to be surrounded by familiar, soothing smells when I’m away – so I take my perfume, Tom Ford Café Rose, everywhere and usually some lavender essential oil that I can put on my pillow, in a bath and even on my temples.’
Emma Corrin Takes the Throne
The Crown’s Princess Diana isn’t totally ready for superstardom, but it’s been waiting for her.This summer, Emma Corrin, who joins season 4 of The Crown as Princess Diana, found herself on the same plane as Vanessa Kirby, who starred as Princess Margaret in seasons 1 and 2. “We had this moment of reunion as if we were long lost sisters. It was so nice,” says Corrin, 24, of the instant kinship. (The pair had only met briefly before.) “It’s because you’re part of a family.”
In joining the esteemed series, Corrin has forged connections not only with A-list co-stars like Olivia Colman, Tobias Menzies, and Helena Bonham-Carter, but become part of a lineage of talents from seasons past and future. Though she’s a relative newcomer among her colleagues (previous credits include the Epix Batman spinoff Pennyworth), she captivates from the first moment she appears onscreen, portraying Diana as a shy teen both forward and demure with Josh O’Connor’s Prince Charles. Over the course of the season, Corrin takes Diana from a young girl of 16 to a confident and increasingly independent 28-year-old.
Corrin spent an audition-packed year fighting for the role, and embodying one of the world’s most famous women presents distinct challenges. “If you say her name, you instantly have her image, you have her voice, you have her mannerisms. That’s a very intimidating thing to be up against,” she says. Joining Peter Morgan’s high-profile series in a pivotal role, Corrin is sure to have a brush with overnight stardom—and its accompanying highs and lows—much like Diana. “All these feelings of excitement, the novelty of it, the fear and the confusion, that’s all what she would have been feeling. Exactly, like play by play,” Corrin says. But fame is something she’s steeled herself for. “I live in a flat with my three best mates from university, none of whom are actors. It keeps you grounded. I never want to get lost in it.”
You were quite young when Diana died. How did you study her?
Peter’s scripts helped immensely. I watched one documentary called In Her Own Words, which is fantastic because it’s narrated by her and you have her telling her story. You’re not going to get closer to an actual version of events than that. Then working with William Conacher, who was my dialect coach, and Polly Bennett, who was my movement, character coach. Working on her physicality and her psychology, that’s when I really felt like I could get my teeth into her.
A Royally Candid Interview with The Crown’s Emma Corrin, Josh O’Connor, and Emerald Fennell
The new season of The Crown exposes the drama, betrayal, and lies that drive the monarchy. Oh, and then there’s that affair…It’s a legendary story, this one,” says Josh O’Connor, flashing a sly, dimpled smile. The British actor, who plays Prince Charles in The Crown, then launches into the serendipitous details—not of the real life love triangle involving Charles, Camilla Parker Bowles, and Lady Diana Spencer, which drives so much of the drama in the series’s fourth season, but rather of the day of auditions that led to the casting of an unknown actress to play one of the most iconic women of the 20th century.
SEE INTERVIEW VIDEO: Here
The story begins in 2018, as the third season of The Crown was getting underway. The casting team was on the hunt for their Camilla and brought in O’Connor to read with a few front-runners. They hadn’t started their search for Diana yet, as her character wouldn’t make an entrance until the following season. But they needed a warm body to run her lines.
Emma Corrin, then just 22 years old, got the call through her agent, who stressed that it was not an audition. “But, obviously, I was like, ‘I’m going to prepare as if it were,’ ” Corrin says. Without the benefit of a hair, makeup, or wardrobe department, Corrin focused on what she had: her voice. She analyzed Diana’s speech patterns with the help of her mother, a speech therapist. “No matter what Diana is saying, it kind of goes down at the end,” Corrin says, slipping into the hauntingly similar imitation that makes her so believable. “It’s like a sadness.”
Corrin was a toddler when Diana died and has no memory of her. Stepping into the casting room that day, she also had no experience acting on television. And yet she captivated the crowd. “I was in awe of her,” O’Connor tells me. “This young actress who hadn’t done an awful lot, and here she was inhabiting Diana, seemingly quite easily.” The Crown’s creator and writer Peter Morgan was entranced too. For Diana’s debut into his award-winning Netflix series, Morgan wasn’t looking for someone to play the global superstar she eventually became; he needed the fidgety 19-year-old girl to whom the Prince of Wales proposed. “We spent our whole time just staring at this woman reading the lines going, ‘Wow, she’s kind of perfect,’ ” Morgan says.
Zooming with Corrin from some 5,000 miles away, I feel that too. Perched in front of a tree-filled window in her London home, she often leans so close to the screen that her forehead is cut off. Her white tank top and cutoff jean shorts are paired rebelliously well with blue gemstone statement earrings, a nod to the princess’s sapphire engagement ring. “I hate being asked what it’s like to play someone iconic,” Corrin says (though, for the record, I hadn’t). “It makes her untouchable—the whole point was that she was touchable.”
Although Corrin impressed the Crown team on that first day, she wasn’t given the part straight away; an extended courtship was required. It took eight months for director Ben Caron to make her an offer. “It was the most exciting proposal I’ll probably ever receive in my life,” Corrin says. To celebrate, she got a blue merle cockapoo and named him Spencer.
Corrin had another six months to prepare, and a team ready to help. The show’s movement coach, Polly Bennett, worked with her on abstract Diana concepts, like how the princess might stand in a doorframe (centered, leaning on one side) and what kind of animal she might be (not a deer in the headlights, as Corrin first thought, but a cat: curious, composed, a bit calculating). Still, it was Corrin’s newcomer status that proved the most useful on set. “If we had gotten an experienced actress, it would have been an actress acting being nervous,” Morgan says. “Trust me, Emma was nervous on every day that we were filming,” calling it “enormously helpful.”
The Crown’s fourth installment spans the 1980s, a transformative decade for the British royal family largely because of Diana. But the People’s Princess is not the framework for these 10 episodes. Once again Morgan centers the season on the prime minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher. As divisive a figure as Thatcher was, the approach poses some new challenges. “When you’ve got Charles and Diana as a narrative, everything else feels a bit like eating vegetables, right?” he says. “The other narratives are necessarily going to be slightly more tired.”
