Princess Diana’s Friend Calls ‘The Crown’ Creators “Sadistic” for Recreating the Most Painful Time in Prince William and Prince Harry’s Lives
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The Crown is currently filming scenes surrounding Princess Diana’s tragic death for the show’s final season, a narrative decision that has caused a lot of backlash, most recently from Princess Diana’s friend Simone Simmons.
Speaking to The Sun, Simmons said the show is putting Prince Harry and Prince William in the position of having to recall “the most painful time” of their lives. In a strongly worded statement, Simmons said:
“These are cruel, sadistic, and wicked people to re-create these moments. They are the lowest of the low. They are rewriting history as they go along and that’s what makes me very angry. Netflix are deliberately reviving the most painful time in the boys’ lives. It’s forcing them to relive the pain, agony, and psychological torment they suffered when their mother died. I think it’s disgusting and sick. Why are they setting out to upset William and Harry? The makers of this program do not care about the heir to the throne and everything he has been through. Why do these callous, insensitive people feel the need to re-create that horrible day?”
Simmons’s comments come after Elizabeth Debicki (who plays Diana) responded to concerns that the Princess of Wales’s death won’t be handled with enough sensitivity.
“Well, I don’t really know about those concerns,” Elizabeth told Entertainment Weekly. “I’ll say that Peter and the entire crew of this job do their utmost to really handle everything with such sensitivity and truth and complexity, as do actors. The amount of research and care and conversations and dialogue that happen over, from a viewer’s perspective, something probably that you would never ever notice is just immense. From that very first meeting [with] Peter, I knew that I’d entered into this space where this was taken seriously in a deeply caring way. So that’s my experience of the show.”
FYI, Deadline recently reported that there’s tension and anxiety on-set about filming scenes surrounding Diana’s death, with creatives and producers on edge. “We’ve been dreading getting to this point,” a source told the outlet on October 12. “The countdown is two weeks and while we’re calmly carrying on, it’s fair to acknowledge that there’s a certain anxiety; a palpable sense of being slightly on edge. I mean, there’s bombshell sensitivity surrounding this one.”
Meanwhile, Netflix responded to backlash about The Crown blurring the lines of fiction and history, saying in a statement to Deadline regarding season 5, “The Crown has always been presented as a drama based on historical events. Series 5 is a fictional dramatization, imagining what could have happened behind closed doors during a significant decade for the royal family—one that has already been scrutinized and well documented by journalists, biographers, and historians.”
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