Practically everyone in the world knows the story of Princess Diana’s tumultuous life and tragic death. But in The Crown‘s sixth and final season, the Emmy-winning drama will tell its version of the final months leading up to a car crash in Paris that tipped the royal family into mourning and controversy.
Elizabeth Debicki returns as Diana in the final season — the first four episodes debut on Netflix on Nov. 16 — and the new trailer puts the spotlight on her just as brightly as the paparazzi flashbulbs were in the ’90s.
The clip shows Diana sharing emotional moments with her sons, William (Rufus Kampa and Ed McVey) and Harry (Will Powell and Luther Ford), as well as her infamous landmine walk in Angola, but it mainly focuses on the explosion of media attention and paparazzi pursuit that surrounded her romance with Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla).
“I don’t really understand how I ended up here,” Debicki’s Diana muses in the trailer. “Dashing around, and losing sight of myself in the process.”
The series is known for recreating some of the royal family’s most infamous moments to excruciating detail, and season 6 will be no different. The trailer includes the famous photos of Diana in a bathing suit on a yacht being taken, which sold to tabloids for millions of dollars. The photos are thought to be one of the incidents that ignited paparazzi attention around her to the frenzied level that followed her and Dodi to Paris on that fateful night in August 1997.
There’s also an ominous shot of the royal family’s Balmoral Castle being woken up in the middle of the night with the news that Diana, Dodi, and their driver had been killed in a car accident — as well as the controversy that followed when the royals remained silent as the country was in mourning.
“What do people want from me?” asks Queen Elizabeth II, played once again by Imelda Staunton.
Then-Prince Charles, played again this season by Dominic West, emotionally replies, “For you to be mother to the nation!”
Watch the full trailer below.
Read Netflix’s official synopsis of season 6 below:
The 6th season will close out the genre-defining prestige royal saga that has been on screens since 2016. Part 1 will debut on Netflix on November 16th . These first four episodes depict a relationship blossoming between Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed before a fateful car journey has devastating consequences.
In their first Summer as a divorced couple, Prince Charles and Princess Diana share very different holidays with their sons. Diana is being courted by the Fayeds in the South of France, giving the young Princes a taste of luxury yachts, video games and movie nights. Charles is sticking to tradition in Balmoral. The comparisons play out in the press, fuelled by a fervent paparazzi, and some of the Royal press team.
As yacht life and the constant media scrutiny loses its appeal, Diana longs to return to see her boys, who are back in Balmoral. A diversion to Paris sees matters come to a head – against the backdrop of an intensified and aggressive media pursuit.
After the news breaks of Diana and Dodi’s fatal car accident, a vast outpouring of public grief catches the Queen off-guard. With shockwaves resonating through the Palace, Al Fayed is also processing the loss of his cherished son. Hoping that the news will bring him and the Royal Family together in shared grief; he instead finds himself increasingly shunned.
The series also stars Jonathan Pryce as Prince Philip, and Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret, Olivia Williams as Camilla Parker Bowles, Meg Bellamy as Kate Middleton, Salim Daw as Mohamed Al-Fayed, Bertie Carvel as Tony Blair, Lydia Leonard as Cherie Blair, Marcia Warren as Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, Claudia Harrison as Anne, Princess Royal, Theo Fraser Steele as Timothy Laurence, James Murray as Prince Andrew, Sam Woolf as Prince Edward, Matilda Broadbridge as Pippa Middleton and Andrew Havill as Robert Fellowes.
The Crown season 6 will premiere in two parts: Part 1 on Nov. 16 and Part 2 on Dec. 14.
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