Netflix’s fifth installment of The Crown released the full trailer today, via Deadline. The series created by Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, The Queen) has chronicled Queen Elizabeth II’s reign across four seasons. The fifth season will enter the 1990s when the Royal Family faced both political strife and familial scandal in the public eye. View the trailer below.
Set to a subversive cover of The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” the trailer highlights the main arcs this season which focus heavily on the public’s unwavering trust in the monarchy, as well as the dramatic unraveling of Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s marriage. This time around Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake, Downton Abbey) will take on the role of the Queen as she conforms to a very different world with the recent fall of the Soviet Union. Along with Stauton is Jonathan Pryce (Game of Thrones, All the Old Knives) as her husband, Prince Philip.
Simultaneously, the Royal Family is faced with a monumental scandal as the Prince of Wales’s marriage to Princess Diana ends. The Affair and The Wire actor Dominic West will portray Prince Charles, while Widows and Tenet actress Elizabeth Debicki takes on the iconic role of Diana. The season will trace their bitter divorce, Diana’s rebellious departure, and the unfortunate ending to this chapter for the monarchy: the untimely death of Lady Di in a 1997 car accident in Paris. Per Deadline, Netflix affirmed the accident will not be recreated.
“We’ve been dreading getting to this point,” a source from production told Deadline. “The countdown is two weeks and while we’re calmly carrying on it’s fair to acknowledge that there’s a certain anxiety; a palpable sense of being slightly on edge. I mean, there’s bombshell sensitivity surrounding this one.”
According to Deadline, additions to the show this season include Olivia Williams as Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles’ then-girlfriend and current wife. The show will also introduce Khalid Abdalla (Green Zone, Birds Like Us) as Dodi Fa-yed, Diana’s boyfriend at the time of her death and the only other victim of the fatal automobile accident. Salim Daw (Oslo, Let It Be Morning) will portray his father, Mohamed Fa-yed. There is also the infamous former BBC reporter Martin Bashir, portrayed by Prasanna Puwanarajah (Ballywalter, Ten Percent), who orchestrated a pinnacle solo interview with Diana in 1995.
Season five of The Crown arrives on Netflix globally on November 9.