I Need All The Princess Diana Tea Behind The Crown‘s 5th Season

If no one is currently working on a docuseries about the making of The Crown, let this be the official suggestion to get someone on this STAT because the drama behind-the-scenes is downright soap operatic.

In the midst of the production for the fifth season of the hit Netflix series, which is slated to arrive at the end of next year, some tea has been spilled about how the late Princess Diana is being portrayed. With season four ending ahead of Princess Diana and then-husband Prince Charles splitting up, the upcoming season appears to be taking place in the early ‘90s and covering the dissolution of their relationship.

As such, it seems more than fitting that one of the Princess of Wales’ close friends was brought in to help write the scripts about the last few years of Diana’s life. However, that friend — Jemima Khan — has now pulled out of the project because she reportedly felt that her friend’s story was not being handled “as respectfully or compassionately as I had hoped.”

Khan had apparently chosen to take part in consulting on the show’s script because, as per The Times, “it was really important to me that the final years of my friend’s life be portrayed accurately and with compassion, as has not always happened in the past.”

In tandem with The Times reporting that Khan had consciously uncoupled from The Crown, the publication also made sure to mention that show-runner Peter Morgan and Khan “were briefly linked romantically, but broke up earlier this year.”

A juicy lil factoid that is made even more salacious when you remember that Morgan previously dated The Crown star Gillian Anderson, who portrays Margaret Thatcher on the series, for several years. They reportedly ended their romance at the end of 2020, though there have been murmurings that they briefly got back together early in 2021.

Khan withdrawing from the series is just another recent and noteworthy happening either on or about The Crown set. Upon hearing that the fifth season would include an episode on Diana’s 1995 sit-down with journalist Martin Bashir on the BBC’s Panorama, an interview that has been widely sensationalized particularly in the aftermath of her 1997 death, Diana’s son Prince William expressed some negative feelings for the series.

The Telegraph reported last month that William was “frustrated” at The Crown’s “commercialization” of the interview; such a sentiment is less than surprising considering his response to the official inquiry into the interview that concluded in May 2021.

William lambasted the “deceitful way the interview was obtained” and claimed it “substantially influenced what my mother said.”

“The interview was a major contribution to making my parents’ relationship worse and has since hurt countless others,” he shared at the time.

Diana’s other son, Harry, has also been embroiled in the fray surrounding the upcoming season. As word spread about how The Crown is representing his mother, many UK papers are already imploring Harry to ditch the “megawatt” and “multiyear” Netflix deal he inked with wife Meghan Markle in 2o20. The deal will pay the couple to “make documentaries, docu-series, feature films, scripted shows and children’s programming,” reported the New York Times.

Diana’s sons — and their rumored-to-be-deeply-fraught relationship — aside, there’s no question that the shit is most certainly going to hit the fan when the season drops based on how the late royal’s friends reacted to Spencer, the film about her starring Kristen Stewart.

In a recent interview with The Telegraph, four friends of Diana’s shared that she would be “horrified” by her portrayal in pop culture and that what we see of her now is “not the best way to understand her. “

Uh, we’re suddenly very ready for November 2022 to get here NOW.