Elizabeth Debicki admitted her Critics Choice Awards win for Best Supporting Actress was "unexpected" as she recalled how "terrifying" it was to portray the late Diana, Princess of Wales in 'The Crown'.
Elizabeth Debicki insists she never anticipated walking away with the top prize
The 33-year-old star has regularly spoken out about how much pressure she felt playing the late royal - who tragically died in a car crash in Paris in 1997 aged 36 - in the Netflix drama.
She said onstage at the bash at Santa Barbara's Barker Hangar on Sunday (14.01.24): “I truly did not expect this.
“This role has been an incredible gift to me, it has been an incredible challenge, a terrifying challenge and I will always be grateful for it.
“My only hope really was that I would do this remarkable woman proud by playing her in this show.”
She went on to heap praise on co-star Khalid Abdalla, who played Diana's partner Dodi Fayed, adding: “If I did anything good in this show, you are half of it, you are a dear friend."
The Critics Choice prize comes after she won the same award at the Golden Globes earlier this month.
Elizabeth admitted the pressure and "immense responsibility" of portraying Diana's final days "woke us up in the night".
Asked how seriously they approached the subject matter, she told 'Entertainment Tonight': "An immense, immense responsibility.
"It's difficult to describe, it was something that we thought about, that we carried with us, that woke us up in the night."
She continued: "We tried our very best to do [the story] properly."
The 'Tenet' star hopes viewers walked away seeing Diana from a different perspective.
She told Australia's WHO magazine in November: "I hope they learn that, despite how difficult things were for her, that she never lost the strength and courage to continue.
It's unfathomable to me that someone so broken down by so many things can still possess the generosity of spirit to reach out to people and give them the thing they are not getting from anywhere else.
Diana was a woman capable of giving people so much love. She was able to truly see people - but the tragedy was that nobody really ever saw her for who she was."
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