The reign of Elizabeth

She's one of Australia's most accomplished actors, and has had a glittering year with awards and accolades for her role as Princess Diana in The Crown. Elizabeth Debicki opens up about success and her surprising next move

- ANGELA MOLLARD

Having run the gauntlet of press interviews and thrown her arms around multiple fellow actor friends, Elizabeth Debicki slid into her seat at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in late February and kicked her shoes off under the table. She had already bagged a Golden Globe and a Critics’ Choice Award in January for her extraordinary performance as Princess Diana in celebrated Netflix series The Crown, but this was the SAG Awards, where there’s no supporting actress category for a television show, just a single award for a female actor in a drama series. Up against the likes of Sarah Snook (for Succession) and Jennifer Aniston (for Morning Wars), she figured there was no chance she’d win.

When Debicki’s name was called out, not only was she in shock but she had to try to retrieve those pesky shoes. Having kissed her boyfriend, Kristian Rasmussen, she tottered across the ballroom, shoes half on, half off, before abandoning them. “I just kicked them off and dashed up on stage and did a speech that I really did pull from nowhere,” she recalls.

At 190cm tall and standing in front of her peers in an ice-blue Armani Privé gown embroidered with 145,000 rhinestones, she was no less commanding in bare feet. But as a friend later remarked, she’d given herself the ultimate acting challenge by fronting up to Hollywood’s finest actors and directors and improvising.

“It definitely wasn’t intentional and I probably won’t do that again because – while it wasn’t frightening – I was extremely present,” she says, wincing. “You look down and there’s Bradley Cooper and Meryl Streep and you’re like, ‘Whoa, OK.’”