CULTURE

The Crown’s Season 5 Trailer Opens With Flames

The upcoming season is getting closer and closer to our day and age, and it's dark.

by Aimée Lutkin
A still from the Netflix show The Crown, depicting Princess Diana in a lavender colored suit
Netflix

The new trailer for season five of The Crown opens with Windsor Castle in flames and then Imelda Staunton as Queen Elizabeth standing in the charred wreckage. The season is starting over with a whole new cast rising like a phoenix from the ashes. Elizabeth Debicki becomes Princess Diana in the moment in her life when she decided to start burning everything down.

This season will be exploring the 1990s, an era when a lot was changing for the royal family and not always for the better. The trailer shows Prince Charles, played by Dominic West, urging his mother to move into the modern world. Diana is being pressured to remain loyal to the royal family and keep all their secrets even as her husband continues his longstanding affair with Camilla Parker. But she won’t be quiet any longer.

As she sits down to her infamous 1995 interview with the BBC, Diana says, “I won't go quietly. I'll battle to the end.”

In one clip, Debicki is costumed in a recreation of Diana’s “Revenge Dress,” a black off-the-shoulder gown she wore in June of 1994 on the same day that Charles confessed that he had been unfaithful to her on national television.

Princess Diana Archive/Hulton Royals Collection/Getty Images
via Netflix

With both Prince Charles and Prince Andrew creating tabloid scandals with their separations from their wives, it was a pretty high-stress time in the family. And once Windsor Castle caught fire, wild debates raged in the country over who should be paying to restore it. Ultimately, the money came from the Queen’s coffers and from opening up parts of Buckingham Palace for a fee — the controversy also prompted Elizabeth to begin paying income tax, which no British monarch had done since the 1930s. So, like, King George VI didn’t.

Mathieu Polak/Sygma/Getty Images

The Crown has been moving towards the time where they will be filming the time up to and around Princess Diana’s death, though creator Peter Morgan has said he won’t be recreating the actual moment of the crash in Paris. Production was briefly paused when Queen Elizabeth passed away on September 8, but has since picked up again.