The Crown’s Elizabeth Debicki Says She Kept Emulating Princess Diana After Filming: 'I Had to Unwind the Wheel' (Exclusive)

Elizabeth Debicki admittedly had a hard time letting go of portraying Princess Diana in her Emmy-nominated performance in The Crown. In this week's issue, the actress, 33, opens up about playing the late royal — and the mannerisms that took her a long time to shake.

The Australian actress says that she found herself emulating Princes Diana "for a long while" after wrapping the series' sixth and final season.

"My voice changed quite a bit and I kind of had to consciously bring it back to my own voice where my voice wants to sit and also my own accent," she explains. "I had to work so hard at getting the voice that I sort of ingrained it so deeply in myself that I had to unwind the wheel."

Debicki notes that she was "doing quite a lot of physical stuff as well" and would catch herself "doing a lot of head tilting."

"Someone said to me, 'I think you're doing it when you're trying to convince people something.' If someone was like, 'You can't go that way.' I [found] myself sort of saying, 'Are you sure?' And then I was like, 'Oh my God, I'm slipping into this.'"

"That has left me now, but I had to do it consciously," she adds.

Debicki portrayed the mother of Prince Harry and Prince William in the last two seasons of The Crown, which focused on the royal’s final days before her fatal car crash in August 1997. She's nominated for outstanding supporting actress in a drama for her performance at the 2024 Emmys.

"I was so thrilled that so many of us have been nominated," Debicki says of her costars' nods (the Netflix show snagged a total of 18 nominations this year). "That just feels like the cherry on the cake really of such a nice thing."

She continues, "The show's been running for a long time and my cast and I have been kind of on this ride for nearly three years in a way, in terms of prep and then shooting and press, and so it's just a lovely end to a long and beautiful — but sometimes really challenging — chapter as actors."

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Debicki says the most "inspiring" part about playing the royal was seeing the "progression" of Princess Diana's charitable work . '[The] activism sense of her life was something she really believed in, and she did so much work for so many causes that people weren't really paying attention to."

"She really put herself on the line to draw awareness around them... you can take it for granted now, in a way that's so much more common, and we have so many more platforms for that. But at the time it was so radical, and I think learning about how much she really personally did that work, that was very kind of fascinating and beautiful to learn about."

In November 2023, the actress told PEOPLE that the weight of playing Diana for the Netflix series was not lost on her, sharing, “I did a lot of research for this role. I probably spent about a year doing research and that just filled in all these pieces and made me have such deep, deep respect and love for this person who I didn't know so much about.” 

For more on Elizabeth Debicki, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here. 

All six seasons of The Crown are streaming on Netflix.