The Crown Recap: Season 5 Episode 9 – Scene with Charles and Diana

Warning: This post contains spoilers for episode 9 of The crownis the fifth season.

They may be married, but Prince Charles and Princess Diana didn’t really cross paths in Season 5 of The crown – up to a long scene that is considered the highlight of the season.

In the ninth episode, Charles and Diana’s divorce was finalized, and after the papers were signed, Charles (played by Dominic West) stopped by to visit Diana (played by Elizabeth Debicki) for an unexpectedly warm and candid “autopsy” of it what had gone wrong in their marriage. It’s a long scene, about 12 minutes long, and it caught Debicki and West’s attention from the start.

“Dom and I started calling it our ‘one-act play,'” Debicki told reporters at a Netflix press event on Thursday. “We didn’t see each other a lot on set because the stories didn’t really tie together up to this point in the season. Every time I saw him in the trailer, we were always like, ‘When are we going to do the play?’”

The production took three days just to shoot that one scene, Debicki reveals…including “a whole day to make an omelette. I’m not exaggerating.” (At one point Diana tries to make Charles an omelet, gives up and instead serves him scrambled eggs.) “I think there’s 40 seconds of that in the scene. it was the day [showrunner] Peter [Morgan] came on set and he got so grumpy, ‘Are you going to make that omelette all day?'”

All things considered, “I think I made 42 omelettes or something,” Debicki recalls, but all of that repetition proved to be beneficial to the actors. “We were so relaxed after making the omelette 40 times that when we sat down at the kitchen table,” she notes, “we inevitably knew it was going to end up in this really painful spot, [but] we were still laughing about the scrambled eggs.”

The scene has “this beautiful movement,” she adds: “It’s the kind of material that feels like a gift because there’s just so much to discover in the scene.” Although the scene is ultimately a difficult one for Diana, admits Debicki that she enjoyed them on a certain level: “The material that I’ve made is heavy and it takes you to a really, really, really sad place. But there’s also a part of your actor’s brain that’s having the greatest time… I’m crying and all the snot is pouring down my face and then this little actor’s antennae goes up and goes, ‘God, this is so good . This is so much fun.’” (Additional coverage by Kimberly Roots)