The Crown’s newest star Emma Corrin has revealed how she ended up in a Spanish hospital after filming a swimming pool scene for the show.
The 24-year-old is set for worldwide fame after playing Princess Diana in the new series of the royal drama which will be available to stream from Sunday.
She told Glamour magazine how she fell ill after spending two months on location with co-star Josh O’Connor, who plays Prince Charles, recreating the couple’s 1983 tour of Australia.
The cast and crew did not travel Down Under to recreate the tour, instead substituting locations around Spain.
She said: “I’m asthmatic and had been ill for a while with a cough. I had to film a scene in a freezing-cold swimming pool. It was the hardest scene to film because I was genuinely keeping myself alive treading water.
“We were meant to be flying back that night to the UK and went past a hospital to get antibiotics. The doctors gave me an oxygen test and said, ‘We can’t let you go because your oxygen levels are so low,’ so I was hospitalised.
“I remember the nurses figuring out what I was filming and saying, ‘Would you like us to put a cardboard box over your head so no one recognises you?’”
The fourth series of the Netflix show, which also stars Olivia Colman as the Queen and Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher, is set between 1977 and 1990. It will feature Charles and Diana’s wedding and the births of Prince William and Harry.
Corrin said she refuses to call the princess an “icon”, saying she is “much more important than any kind of label”.
She said: “I find the word icon in reference to any woman we put on a pedestal to be quite reductive.
“The label of icon ignores so much of who Diana was and her beautiful complexity. She was called the People’s Princess because people felt they could relate to her. That is so much more important than any kind of label.”
The actress also explained how she had dance lessons for the role which provided her with the opportunity to “let go” in the same way ballet lessons did for Diana.
She said: “When we filmed a scene of her having a ballet lesson, which was meant to symbolise her letting go, I was asked to dance to Believe by Cher, unchoreographed.
“I just lost my shit, and when I went out of the room everyone watching on the screens was crying. It felt like the truest way of working through stuff.”
Read the full feature in the Glamour UK Autumn/Winter 20/21 print issue available now
