For both Emma Corrin and Elizabeth Debicki, the road to “The Crown” began with failed auditions. Each performer was up for a guest part in the Netflix series’ early seasons; both ended up playing Princess Diana at different ages. Corrin was Emmy-nominated for portraying the newly wed and then increasingly disillusioned princess in Season 4. Debicki, previously a nominee for Season 5, which centered on Diana’s divorce from Prince Charles, is eligible for a nomination this year for the show’s final season, in which Diana tragically dies in Paris. Corrin has springboarded off their “Crown” success into further risky and intriguing roles — this season playing the enigmatic and dogged sleuth Darby Hart on FX’s snowbound mystery “A Murder at the End of the World,” created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij.

EMMA CORRIN: We had a similar thing where you auditioned for a smaller role before.

ELIZABETH DEBICKI: Yeah.

CORRIN: For Season 1 or 2?

DEBICKI: 2.

CORRIN: Mad. And then they called you back. What was the role you went in for?

DEBICKI: I’ve never told anyone what the role is because the person who did it was so brilliant.

CORRIN: Was it a big role?

DEBICKI: You know how in “The Crown,” there are cameos that pop up and the whole episode becomes about that person that might only appear for one or two?

CORRIN: Mm-hmm.

DEBICKI: So, in that sense, it was a big role. But I was almost completely physically wrong for it.

CORRIN: Love an audition like that.

DEBICKI: Love that. You feel very prepared. Here’s my takeaway from the fact that we both have this story: Maybe we’re better at acting when we’re not trying. I went to do this audition because Season 1 had just aired and it was huge. Do you remember?

CORRIN: I remember where I was when I first watched it. I was in my second year of uni in my tiny single bed in an attic somewhere. Cross-legged on my bed.

DEBICKI: With your little dinner on your lap?

CORRIN: My little pot noodles. Being like, “Whoa, this is cool!” I hadn’t seen anything like it before. Peter Morgan smashed it.

DEBICKI: It was so lush. To be frank, the amount of money that was on the screen was extraordinary. It was sort of at the dawn of television becoming this Golden Age — especially Netflix. I don’t know when “House of Cards” came out — my 20s are a blur. But I went in for the Season 2 part, and I got an email a few days later from my agent saying, “Not that part, but we are thinking …”

CORRIN: And they explicitly said it? That’s wild.

DEBICKI: I guess they must have felt something Diana in it, which is hilarious because I wasn’t playing an English person even. The funny thing is, for five or six years, I continued to watch “The Crown” religiously, and I would think, “I wonder if that’s ever going to come around.” And when you were cast, I thought, “Well, it was a nice dream.”

CORRIN: Oh no.

DEBICKI: And I thought, “Well, you’re perfect. Who is this creature?” I sort of gave up the thing when you appeared.

CORRIN: I went in for a chambermaid — a real “Tree No. 2” kind of role. The queen’s chambermaid — is that what it’s called?

DEBICKI: Lady-in-waiting.

CORRIN: That one. I went in for that and never heard anything.

DEBICKI: What was the line?

CORRIN: Something like, “Yes, ma’am.” Curtsy.

DEBICKI: I can’t imagine you just went in for Tree No. 2.

CORRIN: No, genuinely. And then I got asked to read with the Camillas.

DEBICKI: Once you had the part, how much time did you have to prepare?

CORRIN: I want to say six months. And I read that you did a similar thing, which is to ask for all the research. You’ve got all the binders. I loved it.

DEBICKI: It just landed in this big box outside my flat. The one thing that struck me about “The Crown” was the machinery to help you prepare was so extensive and available. Should you wish to click on any of these boxes, these things were just there for you. That, for me, was — after doing many other jobs — something I’d never seen before.

CORRIN: Did you feel overwhelmed by it?

DEBICKI: It was a double-edged sword. Because I love to just dive straight in. If I do something that’s historic, I’ll find any reason to do immense amounts of research. But this was particularly overwhelming.

CORRIN: With her, it’s bottomless. At some point, I was like, “I’ve got to stop, because there’s too much.”

DEBICKI: I’m curious about at what point you decided to throw it out. For me, I was trying to carry around so much information. And it was important, because at one point during, I’m sure, a mild nervous-panic-attack-breakdown thing, I decided that what would stick would stick, and it would have to do. Because there was no way of accumulating everything I felt I needed to. And I was doing more than I’d ever done because I felt that I owed —

CORRIN: You want to do it justice.
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The Crown’s Emma Corrin Is Sure There Was “So Much Love” Between Princess Diana and Prince Charles

The newcomer opens up about her longstanding Diana obsession, pushing for the Princess’s eating disorder to be portrayed onscreen, and naming her dog Spencer.

SEE INTERVIEW VIDEO: here

It isn’t easy to make a fashion statement over Zoom, but Emma Corrin has done it. The actress appears on my screen wearing a horse-patterned dress, and paired it with a gold horse pendant necklace. It’s still stylish somehow, very Alessandro Michele-Gucci maximalist, but definitely a choice—and one that might carry a deeper meaning if she had played famed horse girls Princess Anne or Queen Elizabeth on The Crown.

But no, Corrin is the up-and-coming actress behind the show’s Princess Diana, and is actually “terrified” of horses (“They’re just so huge, they can run so fast”). If anything, her equine outfit is indicative of her willingness to go with the flow: when she was given a horse dress to wear, she realized she “weirdly” had a horse necklace that she’d never had a chance to wear, et voilà, head-to-toe stallions. It’s a quality that will come in handy when I ask her if her dog, whom she named Spencer after you-know-who, has anything in quality with his namesake—Corrin just gives a brief laugh and admits that she’s “not prepared for this to be a question” before indulging me with an answer.

Below, Corrin opens up about season four of The Crown, the complexities of Charles and Diana’s marriage, and finding a mentor in Helena Bonham Carter.

I know you’ve had a longstanding interest in Diana. As someone who, like me, who didn’t know her when she was alive, I’m curious what drew you to her.
I think growing up, I just had this overwhelming awareness of her relatability and that people seemed to adore her for being very empathetic and very caring. I very much grew up with the whole “the People’s Princess” understanding of who she was.

It really intrigued me when I got the role and started doing research, because I was quite keen to actually see, or try and understand, the person behind that, which I suppose is what the series is so great at doing.

How did your perception of her change as you got to know her better?
I don’t think my perception changed particularly, but I think I just had a new understanding or greater understanding of the complexity of everything that she was going through. I really was interested in learning about what she was like when she was younger. I really enjoyed those episodes, particularly everything in episodes two and three I suppose, when she’s meeting the royal family for the first time and you see her with her flatmates and her life before everything. I think it gave me a real appreciation of how young she was and the life she’d left behind and how she went into this thinking it was going to be one thing and then it turned out to be very much another.

Were you at all interested in Charles or Camilla, or know much about them, before the show?
I guess I had a very vague understanding of everything, but I guess also with The Crown, with Peter’s writing, it takes everything behind closed doors. What we end up showing in this season is very much unchartered territory, I suppose. It’s very fictionalized. I mean, Peter has this amazing way of writing very complex human characters and really bringing out the nuance in relationships. I was really interested in learning those nuances in the love triangle, I suppose, as it’s come to be known.

What kind of nuances?
Josh and I talked a lot about the complexities of marriage, I suppose, and also the pressures that everyone was facing in that situation. The pressure that Charles felt to do the right thing, do his duty, choose a wife. And how young Diana was. How she really liked Charles and had an idea that marrying him would be, I suppose as the episode suggests, some kind of fairytale. Then, Charles’s love for Camilla, which to be fair, was there for the whole of his life.

I think it was just a very unfortunate series of events, honestly, and it was just interesting to see all of these things play over each other. I’ve been asked in a lot of interviews like, “Oh, whose side are you on?” Or like, “What do you think about this?” It’s very hard, and it’s impossible to pick a side, because it’s so much more complicated than that.

Also, I hope that we don’t have to choose sides in interpersonal relationships.
Exactly. Right? I mean, that’s the thing—if anyone asks [to choose sides], you should say, “Can you do that in your relationships?” There’s so much more to it than that. Josh and I also always maintain that there must have been so much love between Charles and Diana, because it is possible to love someone and also for it not work out in a marriage or in a relationship. It happens every day, all the time.

When you were preparing for the role, did you get any good insights from people who knew Diana personally?
I met with her personal secretary, Patrick Jephson, who was wonderful to talk to. He was really great. He worked with her for a number of years, and I remember him describing her as such a happy person, and that really meant a lot to me. He said that even though she was going through a lot, especially as the marriage was ending, he said, “If you knew her well, then you knew that you could make her smile in an instance.”

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