The recently released first part of the final season of Netflix’s The Crown dramatises the whirlwind romance between Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed. The relationship lasted less than two months before ending in tragedy, when Diana and Dodi perished in a car crash in Paris. The first four episodes of the final season build towards this inevitable climax resolutely, but also take the time to flesh out a romance that unfolded in the public, but went unacknowledged by both Diana and Dodi.
The relationship was confirmed when pictures of the couple, sneakily taken aboard a yacht in Italy, were sold to British tabloids for a quarter-of-a-million pounds. Three weeks later, Diana and Dodi would be dead. A new featurette shared by Netflix revisits the true story behind the narrative arc, which imagines the interactions that the couple might have had with each other, and the pressure that Dodi’s father, the businessman Mohammed Al Fayed, was putting on him to be with her. Diana and Dodi first met in the late 1980s, but became close in 1997. They never attended any public events together, nor did they ever confirm their romance.
The photos were syndicated to numerous publications around the world, raking in millions. They also proved to the paparazzi that there was real money to be made by chasing Diana and Dodi, and this only unleashed a whole new level of interest in them. “It was very difficult to re-create. It was heavy, manic, and incredibly invasive,” said actor Elizabeth Debicki about Diana and Dodi’s scenes with the paparazzi. “The media invasion into that relationship and the world’s attention on it, the way that Peter’s written it, so destabilises their ability to keep connecting on that level.”
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Diana and Dodi died after being chased on the streets of Paris by the paparazzi, and the new season explores the intensity of the media attention that they were receiving. Diana had just emerged from her failed marriage with Charles, and was focusing on being the best mother that she could. But during this time, Mohammed Al Fayed took it upon himself to play Cupid between Diana and Dodi, going so far as to tip the paparazzi off about their whereabouts.
Among the most important imagined conversations is the one that Diana and Dodi have in a hotel room in Paris, mere hours before their deaths. The show suggests that Dodi proposed to her, which Diana calmly rejected, reminding him that marrying her would not solve his daddy issues, and that she wasn’t ready to tie the knot with anyone just yet. “It was so important that at that moment, a love is expressed,” actor Khalid Abdalla said about the scene in a Netflix Tudum article. “You get a deep, deep honesty between them, where you feel that they know they have been good for each other without needing to answer the question, Will they be together for the rest of their lives or not?” It’s not our job to answer these questions, it’s to ask them as intensely as possible. And somehow, in that scene — which was amazing to do — it gets the most intense.”
Abdalla also described Dodi as ‘one of the greatest roles’ of his life. He said, “Dodi is a person who has been on supermarket shelves in magazines. People know of his ending, and then nothing else about him. What did he stand for? What was his story?” Season six of The Crown debuted with a four-episode part one on Thursday. The series will end for good in December, with a six-episode part two.
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