Here’s Why The Crown Skipped Princess Diana and Prince Charles’s Royal Wedding

The Crown’s fourth season trailers teased Princess Diana’s wedding dress for months, so it came as a surprise when the show skipped her extravagant wedding to Prince Charles. Now we know the real reason the Netflix series did not recreate the moment.

The couple’s wedding—which took place on July 29, 1981—is considered one of the biggest events in modern history as it is estimated nearly 1 billion people watched or listened to the broadcast live. This, it turns out, is precisely why The Crown chose to leave it out. 

“The wedding scene, you can YouTube it and you could be watching it in 10 seconds, so I don’t think there’d be any point in us recreating it,” Emma Corrin, who effortlessly portrays Lady Di throughout the fourth season of the series, told The Hollywood Reporter.  (You can watch a full recording of the wedding here.)

Instead, the wedding episode, titled “Fairytale,” cuts directly to credits after showing  Diana in her iconic gown. Given viewers were only shown the back of her dress, fans would need to look at The Crown’s Instagram page to see the recreated bridal look in full.

However, Corrin points out that the depiction of the wedding was not crucial to the plot. “We never recreate things just for the sake of recreating them,” she explained.

The awkward Charles and Diana post-engagement interview, however, did make the cut. “I think if we do recreate a scene—like the engagement scene, for instance, when they do the announcement—it has to be because it’s linked to something that the characters are going through,” Corrin continued. “It has to be part of the story. It has to further the plot, basically.”

Corrin further explained that The Crown is about Queen Elizabeth, not Princess Diana. “Everything actually has to feed back to the queen. Even Diana’s plotline, it’s all about what she’s doing and the effect that that’s having on the queen,” she said. “That’s why it’s called The Crown.”

After all, there were a lot of moments that were created just for the series. In fact, Corrin recently told Glamour about a completely unscripted moment from that clubbing scene that made it into the series. 

“I remember at the end of that scene when we’re walking out, we start singing the national anthem, drunkenly. I did that on a whim because [director] Ben Caron was like, ‘Act drunk,’” she recalled. “I’m actually terrified of acting drunk because I think it can go so wrong so easily. I just thought, Maybe I should sing the national anthem. He really loved it, so we kept that in.”

Originally Appeared on Glamour