Elizabeth Debicki knows the power of a good costume, and yes, she knows you’re waiting to see her in The Revenge Dress.
Debicki—who takes over the role of Princess Diana from Emma Corrin in the upcoming season of The Crown*—*opened up about the black off-the-shoulder number that launched Diana’s Divorce Era. “It fascinated me how entranced people were with that dress,” the Australian actor told Entertainment Weekly ahead of the show’s fifth season premiere. “When it became known that I had the part, I received these text messages saying congratulations, [but] there was also a huge amount of text messages about the Revenge Dress. ‘Do you get to wear the Revenge Dress?’ ‘Oh my God, you get to wear the Revenge Dress!'”
As The Crown speeds toward the modern day, there’s more speculation than ever over which events it will portray, and how. Diana’s death, for instance, is reportedly being handled sensitively, though we won’t see it until the sixth and final season, which is currently filming.
Princess Diana Archive/Getty Images
Season five, though, will be all about the divorce, caused primarily by the ongoing affair between then-Prince Charles and his now-wife Camilla Parker Bowles. In 1994, Charles admitted to the affair publicly in a TV documentary, and, that night, Diana stepped out in a Christina Stambolian cocktail dress that immediately became synonymous with her post-Royal, F-you style. (If you’ve seen Spencer, you know how much of her wardrobe was previously dictated by The Firm.)
When Elizabeth Debicki donned a recreation of the garment, she said, it felt “very significant and quite powerful, but also it provoked something in me as an actor. I can’t really explain it. It’s pretty incredible that a dress would represent a moment in history, or that this human’s life would represent so much and become so iconic. So that was a big day on set for me!”
