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 for a shoot celebrating the Metropolitan Museum of Art s new Costume Institute exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties," 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.
The cause for all the Globes hubbub, after which she retreated to the desert of New Mexico for two weeks with Rasmussen (about whom she speaks with careful privacy-hoarding circumspection), was her two-season turn as Diana, Princess of Wales, a catalyzing performance for an actor who has had a varied résumé of supporting roles (in Widows, Tenet, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Vol. 3) but was, prior to The Crown, probably best known among TV sophisticates for the 2016 adaptation of John le Carré’s The Night Manager. Debicki is fond of self-deprecating jokes about being below-radar (a lifelong reader, she’s always loved fictional characters no one wants to talk about, “which is also the title of my career!”). But Debicki as Diana was an uncanny tour de force that was much seen, much written about, celebrated, and still exerts an afterglow. Maybe a hangover too: “The degree of vulnerability for me doing the role was immense…immense,” she tells me. Because she wasn’t inventing a backstory but reckoning with history and facts—and with public opinion. “Here’s this whole life,” she says.
Even at the table read, “she had the character completely,” says costar Dominic West. “I was very much at sea with Charles. I hadn’t quite got a handle on it. And she had the voice. She had everything.” She also had Diana’s humor. “That was the thing that struck me most,” he adds. “How funny she could be.” Hugs, we all need them, one of Diana’s earliest public utterances (or close enough), became Debicki’s catchphrase, a go-to bit of on-set levity.
Debicki knows that she is not cut out for the life of a royal. There’s her propensity to withdraw; there’s also a kind of counterbalancing wanderlust. “I have this insatiable desire to sort of live everywhere, which is absolutely terrible,” she says. London is her base, a new flat, she tells me, where she hosts dinner parties for friends: “I’ve been teaching myself to be a better cook.” Her other anecdotes place her in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Australia, where she visits annually to see her mother and father and two younger siblings. “It’s really hard to live away from them. When you’re 20 the distance just bounces off of you. But now I miss my family terribly all the time.” Her parents were professional ballet dancers—and Debicki herself trained in dance until she was 18. “My body has a memory of once being an extremely fit person,” she says. Her height marked her out to coaches, but she was hopeless: “The basketball team in high school asked me to help intimidate the other side. And then they would bench me for the whole game.” She loved books instead (Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, was an early favorite) and limited her coursework to literature and humanities, which was hell when exams came round: “I’d be practice-writing 12 essays a night.” Sports are still a nonstarter. She likes Pilates and “a walk in the park” for exercise—but in free time she devours novels when she doesn’t have a pile of scripts to get through. Recently she picked up Shirley Jackson’s 1962 classic thriller, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. “Devastating.”
The gothic sensibility of Jackson neatly brings us around to her next film. After The Crown, “I needed to do something very different,” she says, and the role she jumped at was in MaXXXine, the third in a loose horror trilogy written and directed by Ti West, following X and Pearl (each starring Mia Goth as a murderous lunatic). MaXXXine, out July 5, is shrouded in secrecy, but Debicki confirms it’s set in 1980s Hollywood and that she plays a director, Elizabeth Bender. West had watched nearly everything she’d done (excepting The Crown, he tells me) and sent her the script as a kind of Hail Mary. It was a compliment not lost on Debicki. “Would you like to play an ’80s film director with massive leather shoulder pads?” she says. “Yes. I’ve never felt so seen in my life.”
“The movie sort of hinges on you taking her character seriously and being a little bit afraid of her, but also liking her,” says West. “That’s a really small bull’s-eye to hit. I didn’t know if we’d be able to get her—but she jumped at it. And she’s so iconic in the role.”
There is more on the horizon. She’s due to film Andorra, an adaptation of the 1997 Peter Cameron novel, with the Italian director Giuseppe Capotondi (who cast her in his 2019 art world indie, The Burnt Orange Heresy), with Bobby Cannavale and Ruth Wilson—“I would watch Ruth Wilson read the phone book,” Debicki says. Most exciting is a return to the New York stage. She’s done theater before, notably a production of Jean Genet’s The Maids, with Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert, off-Broadway a decade ago, and, in 2016, a David Hare play, The Red Barn, staged in London’s West End.
The new project is another play, and she won’t say more except that she’s producing it herself out of a feeling that she “really, really needed to do some theater stuff again,” she says. Theater—unlike acceptance speeches—puts her inside a ring of safety. “These very strong boundaries,” she says. “You spend four or five weeks in rehearsals carving out a path. It’s like, here are the hedges, here and here, and in that space you can bounce around and really go deep and explore.” She smiles and it’s as if the Globes moment never happened. “The joy I get onstage is just profound.”
In this story: hair, Guido; hair colorist @lenaott; makeup, Dame Pat McGrath; manicurist, Jin Soon Choi; tailor, Carol Ai.
