Princess Diana was one of the most famous women in the world – beloved for everything from her iconic fashion moments, to her famously down to earth parenting style.
So when it came to playing her in The Crown, Emma Corrin must have already had a fair idea of how the late princess was to be portrayed, right?
Well, no not quite.
In fact, Corrin, who played Diana in the fourth season of the Netflix hit, had little prior knowledge of Princess Diana before accepting the role.
"I had no memory of her, so I think that helped me,” they recently told W. “It was a blank slate.”
The Golden Globe winner was just two-years-old when Diana died in a car crash in 1997 – but they knew they wanted to ensure that all the nuanced layers of the late princess' personality were portrayed.
“There became a clear connection from Diana’s unstable childhood to her looking for something welcoming,” they told the publication. "We knew she was a very warm person who gravitated towards people. She was looking to be embraced in something very warm and very familiar, and she didn’t find that at all; she found the exact opposite with the royal family."
Corrin, who will be replaced by Elizabeth Debicki for The Crown's fifth series, also revealed that they pushed for Princess Diana's eating disorder to be explored in greater depth on the show.
“Of course we wanted it to be sensitive and thoughtful,” Corrin revealed. “It’s about the battle for control over your food, in relation to what you’re feeling. For Diana, it was a way of physically getting out everything that she had bottled up.”
Corrin might not have had too much prior knowledge of Princess Diana before stepping into her shoes, but that doesn't mean they weren't a royal fan. In fact, they actually attended Prince William and Kate Middleton's wedding back in April 2011.
Yep, really.
“I remember 10 years ago, I was 15, I was with my friend Katherine and we got very, very swept up in the royal wedding fever, I think probably because we were both very bored and very single. So we decided to go,” they said during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! back in June.
"When we were watching the footage back to see if we could get a glimpse of ourselves, we couldn’t see ourselves but we did see — in the middle of these crowds — this massive inflatable daffodil that she was holding up.”
The sweetest.
Roll on The Crown season five.
