The breakout star of season four of The Crown on her steep rise to fame, how her mum helped her to get Diana’s voice, and why she now wants to get away from doing ‘posh English’
From the moment it began in 2016, The Crown, Netflix’s hugely successful, much admired and occasionally controversial royal soap, has never put a foot wrong when it comes to casting – to the point where its stars have sometimes seemed to save it from itself. But even its producers were worried about the prospect of finding someone to play Princess Diana. Dust down the annals of Di-based drama and they tell a pretty desperate story: of a role that is irresistibly tempting and yet, utterly impossible to pull off. Was she out there somewhere, the woman who could bring her to life? And if she wasn’t, what would this mean for their series? “I was so nervous about being able to find someone capable of doing it, I was prepared to consider cancelling the show and simply not continuing, rather than getting it wrong,” admits its creator and writer, Peter Morgan.
For Morgan and his colleagues, though, the stars would somehow align. In 2018, when season three was still being cast (Diana would not appear until season four), a young unknown called Emma Corrin was asked to come in and help out with a “chemistry” reading as the search for someone to play Camilla Parker Bowles opposite Josh O’Connor’s Charles continued (the part went, in the end, to Emerald Fennell). Corrin, whose agent had instructed her that this was definitely not an audition, went down well with the director: after she’d read as Diana, he took her outside and asked if she would like to work on the character a bit – and eight months later, she got a call asking if she would like to audition properly for Morgan. “In a way, it’s unfair to say that Emma was born to play Diana,” he writes to me in an email. “Because I believe she will have great and lasting success as an actor playing many roles. That said, I do believe – and I think a small part of her might also believe – that she has an uncanny, fated connection to the character and was born to play this part.”
