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Netflix just released a teaser for The Crown season 4, and it’s all about Princess Diana
Diana’s tragic experience as a royal will be a key plot point for the new season of the Netflix original series
Mark your calendars and clear your schedules (if, uh, they need clearing—the pandemic’s got me free as a bird): The Crown season four is premiering on November 15.
Netflix also shared a sneak peek of the new season on social media. Fittingly, the clip opens with Olivia Colman’s Queen Elizabeth, dressed in full royal military regalia. “Something as important as the monarchy can simply not be allowed to fail,” she says in a voiceover.
But then the subject of the trailer changes to a new character, one who has never been shown before in The Crown universe. Paparazzi cries reveal her identity: Lady Diana Spencer, played by Emma Corrin.
Season three, which ended in the mid-1970s, covered Prince Charles’s relationship (and subsequent breakup) with Camilla Shand. However, season four, it seems, will focus entirely on the courtship between him and Diana: Charles and his future wife are said to have met in 1977. At the time, he was dating her older sister. But soon his attention turned, and the two wed in 1981.
Diana and Charles’s royal wedding will be a plot point: The trailer ends ominously with Diana alone in Buckingham Palace, the train of her Elizabeth Emanuel dress dragging behind her. She was 19 years old.
In fact, most of the shots we see of Diana show her solo: walking out of her flat to face the paparazzi, staring at a window onto a vast country expanse, waving to fans—she does all this with no one by her side. The late princess spoke often of the dreadful isolation and depression she felt as a royal: “I seemed to be on the front of a newspaper every single day, which is an isolating experience, and the higher the media put you, place you, is the bigger the drop,” she told the BBC in 1995. The Crown, it seems, will plumb the depths of her experience.
Corrin isn’t the only buzzy new character this season: Gillian Anderson will also star as legendary British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
The article originally appeared on Vogue.com
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The Crown season 6 on Netflix: Everything you need to know about the final season
