Peter Morgan "never imagined" Princess Diana's posthumous depiction in 'The Crown' to be mistaken for her "ghost".
Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana in The Crown
The Netflix regal drama recently caused a stir when it was revealed the upcoming sixth season will see both Prince Charles (Dominic West) and Queen Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton) have visions of the late Princess of Wales (Elizabeth Debicki) following her death in a Paris car crash, but the 60-year-old showrunner simply wanted to find a "unique" way to talk about Diana and give her some "special treatment".
He told Variety: “I never imagined it as Diana’s ‘ghost’ in the traditional sense.
“It was her continuing to live vividly in the minds of those she has left behind. Diana was unique, and I suppose that’s what inspired me to find a unique way of representing her. She deserved special treatment narratively.”
Peter admitted he "dreaded" writing about Diana's final days and even considered avoiding the subject entirely, but he confirmed there was no way he'd have included the minutes she died.
He said: “Oh, God, we were never going to show the crash. Never.”
Although Peter had mostly finished writing the sixth and final season when Queen Elizabeth died in September 2022, he confirmed he changed the show's ending in the wake of the grief that gripped the nation.
He said: “We’d all been through the experience of the funeral.
"So because of how deeply everybody will have felt that, I had to try and find a way in which the final episode dealt with the character’s death, even though she hadn’t died yet.”
While the show has faced some criticism for what is depicted on screen, Peter feels the show deserves praise for some of the controversial subjects it has avoided.
He said: “We once wrote down all the things that we hadn’t put in ‘The Crown.'
"Speculation about paternity, affairs, this, that. It’s unbelievable, all we could have written.”
Tagged in Princess Diana Peter Morgan Elizabeth Debicki