After 25 years, Diana and Dodi are reunited by The Crown
PICTURED together for the first time, here are The Crown’s Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed lookalikes recreating the last family getaway the tragic couple ever took.
In these exclusive photographs, Elizabeth Debicki and Khalid Abdalla bear an uncanny similarity to the ill-fated lovers as they holidayed with William and Harry in the South of France in July 1997. Just a month later, the couple would lose their lives in a Paris car crash.
The actors filmed their scenes for the sixth and final series of the Netflix hit on the Spanish island of Majorca, which stood in for Saint-Tropez, where the real couple stayed aboard a superyacht owned by Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed.
The adult stars were joined by Rufus Kampa, 16, who plays a young Prince William, and Will Powell as Prince Harry.
In the scenes, Ms Debicki, 32, donned a pair of striped trousers similar to those Diana was pictured wearing several times, paired with a navy tank top and white boat shoes. Abdalla, 40, wore cream slacks and a multicoloured shirt.
Production has resumed after pausing for two days for Queen Elizabeth’s death: one immediately after her passing on September 8 and one for her funeral. After news of her death broke, the drama’s writer Peter Morgan was quoted as saying: ‘The Crown is a love letter to her and I’ve nothing to add for now, just silence and respect.’
However the programme has faced criticism over inaccuracies portrayed as truth. In 2020, then UK culture secretary Oliver Dowden demanded that Netflix make clear the show is fiction with an on-screen disclaimer.
‘Without this, I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact,’ he said. The streaming giant has added no such warning.
Fabricated scenes have included the suggestion that the affair between Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles continued throughout his marriage to Diana, and that Charles’s greatuncle, Lord Mountbatten, wrote him a letter condemning the relationship.
Morgan has defended his work, saying: ‘You sometimes have to forsake accuracy, but you must never forsake truth.’
Series five of The Crown is due out this autumn, with series six to be released next year.