By royal decree, or at least Netflix’s, Elizabeth Debicki is your new Princess Diana.
The Australian actor, who’s perhaps best known for her role in 2018’s heist thriller Widows, will star as the “people’s princess” in the final seasons of The Crown, the streaming service announced on Sunday.
Elizabeth will take the reins from Emma Corrin, who is set to play a young Diana Spencer in the upcoming fourth season, which is rumoured to arrive sometime in the coming months.
“Princess Diana’s spirit, her words and her actions live in the hearts of so many,” Elizabeth said in a statement on Sunday.
“It is my true privilege and honour to be joining this masterful series, which has had me absolutely hooked from episode one.”
Every two seasons, the series has reshuffled the cast to allow age-appropriate actors to portray various members of the House of Windsor, as it inches toward the modern day.
Elizabeth will join the cast for the fifth and sixth seasons, which now includes Imelda Staunton as Queen Elizabeth, Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret and the recently announced Jonathan Pryce as the Duke of Edinburgh.
As the final seasons are reportedly set to end in the early 2000s, the series will seemingly cover Diana’s divorce from Prince Charles and her tragic death in 1997.
Netflix initially announced that The Crown would end after five seasons, seemingly scrapping creator Peter Morgan’s original six-season plan for the series. But in July, Morgan changed course, revealing the show would indeed extend to a sixth season.
“As we started to discuss the storylines for [Season 5], it soon became clear that in order to do justice to the richness and complexity of the story, we should go back to the original plan and do six seasons,” Peter said in a statement. “To be clear, [Season 6] will not bring us any closer to present day — it will simply enable us to cover the same period in greater detail.”
Elizabeth has also appeared in projects such as Macbeth, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Everest, The Night Manager, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and the upcoming and much-delayed Tenet from director Christopher Nolan.
She’s the latest star to take her shot at playing the beloved late royal, as it was announced earlier this year that Kristen Stewart will play Princess Diana in the upcoming film Spencer, which will reportedly focus on her tumultuous marriage to Prince Charles.
