ELIZABETH DEBICKI

The actor who brought Princess Diana to life—and won a passel of awards in the process—is ready to transform anew.

- Taylor Antrim

She’s poised for 30 seconds, ethereal in her Dior column dress, thanking the right people, her family, her boyfriend Kristian Rasmussen, the creatives on The Crown. And then Elizabeth Debicki, somewhat gloriously, goes blank. You can see it on her face as the adrenaline ebbs, as a trace of panic sets in. Here she is on the Golden Globes stage, and she can’t think of anything else to say. “Goodness,” she stammers. “Maybe…that’s it?”

Debicki refused, at first, to watch the footage on YouTube, but then forced herself to, once. “ ‘Maybe that’s it?’” she says to me, appalled. “That has to be the most Australian thing anyone’s ever said.”

Equally Australian: shutting down a dance party, which Debicki did later that night alongside Andrew Scott and Billie Eilish “in this random room at the Chateau—but what a lovely room,” she remembers. The whole Globes experience was the biggest moment of the Paris-born, Melbourne-raised actor’s career. But it cost her too. Debicki, 33, who is in Manhattan to play muse and model to photographer Steven Meisel in the images you see across these pages, is someone who does not relish the glare of public attention and actually has to recover from it. “I find carpets quite overwhelming,” she admits.

At six foot three, Debicki can’t help but draw attention, but in person she’s cloaked in the retiring aspect of a graduate student emerging from a library carrel. Long hair, wire glasses, jeans, vintage work shirt, turtleneck, Adidas. No one seems to recognize her on the busy SoHo streets, and miraculously we find an empty-ish café with a menu of adaptogenic teas. She has missed lunch and chooses an infusion with beetroot as sustenance.