Khalid Abdalla On Rejecting the Tabloid’s Label of Dodi Fayed as a Playboy for ‘The Crown’

Many of us still remember when we heard that Princess Diana had died. The images of her funeral and the ghastly news broadcasts are burned in our memories much more vividly than we know. Every time we revisit that tragedy, though, not enough weight is given to some of the other members of that car crash. For Peter Morgan’s final season of The Crown, Khalid Abdalla pays a loving tribute to Dodi Fayed, perhaps the last person to immediately fall in love with The Princess of Wales.

Even to this day, not many of us know what Fayed sounds like. Abdalla spoke in another interview that the researches of the Netflix drama managed to isolate seventeen seconds of audio from when Fayed called into a television show. The circumstances around that call seem almost too strange to believe, but Abdalla was able to begin putting the pieces together by finding his voice.

“No one really knew who he was,” Abdalla says, plainly. “Imagine any life reduced to one word–playboy. Any life shrunken down to that is an absurdity. There are people who ask me before they saw the show if Dodi was still alive. It’s that extensive, and it speaks to who we are culturally and how that moment in history was represented. In terms of that recording, when I was cast, one of the first questions was what he sounded like. When I first met Peter [Morgan] there wasn’t a script and it felt immensely pressing when we were about to do a read-through six months later. Did he sound like me? Did he have a thick Egyptian accent like his father? Even within the range of Americanized Egyptian accents that exist, there are a whole range of them. He died before YouTube and the iPhone, so he didn’t have a phone in his face constantly and it wasn’t getting put online.

That recording is him calling into Larry King to ask Burt Reynolds, who is being interviewed, to do an impression of Tony Curtis doing Cary Grant. It’s so absurd recording imaginable. The research team from The Crown is just extraordinary, and everyone I played that clip for, their eyes widened. It’s an American base that is very different than what you get in Egypt. It’s from a different era. It says a lot about his education and the time he spends in LA. It has small moment of Egyptian in it, but you have to know what that sounds like to identify it. There’s a flavor in it, and there’s a softness.” I’ve done quite a lot of different roles where I’ve played people who people know, and I’ve found that there’s a balance. Everyone has really intense questions that they want answers to. Or an answer to. At the same time, you have things that pepper your reality that are undeniable because of footage or events. The approach that I’ve come to take is that you build a framework to what tethers your reality. In those tethers, you ask the questions that people want answers to as intensely as possible. That creates what I feel is that shimmering. We don’t know the answers to our own lives, when you think about it.”

We keep coming back to the word playboy. If we think about the mid-to-late ’90s, the tabloid media plucked a nickname for you and ran with it. It was splashed in headlines across newsstands all over the world. Diana dealt with that her entire adult life. Abdalla took everything he learned about Fayed’s life and compared it to the makings of this word, and he rejects how easily it was placed on Fayed’s character.

“I understand how it was made, but I don’t agree with it,” he says. “Dodi had a complicated upbringing, and, in basic terms, had attachment issues from his parents divorcing early. He went to boarding school and didn’t get to see his mother a lot when he was younger. His relationship with his father is also complicated but it’s deeply loving. Put that in the context of serial relationship and put it in a rich environment, you get the term playboy when a tabloid throws something at him. When you want to get a deep sense of who this person really is, you begin to draw a picture. Then people tell you how loving and kind he was. Then you wonder if he and Diana fell in love, and I see the CCTV footage of them just before they get in the cars in the back of The Ritz. You see this tender body language between them where Diana is holding his hand behind her back and she’s nuzzling into him and he nuzzles back into her. They separate and then come back into this warm cuddle, so it looks like language of people in love. I hunted for as many pictures of them during their six week relationship as I possibly could. What I did was put them in chronological order and a story emerges. The tender ones stick out to me more. How they pass a look to each other or a simple touch. If you go back to that recording…you can start to hear it.”

Proposal scene…tension…after the scene settles, the energy in the scene feels different / done a different way, that rejection tension would be hanging over the scene too much / a cleansing? / what did that feel like?
As Diana and Fayed struggle to find a semblance of normalcy in Paris as they are pursued, he proposes to her, but she quickly shoots it down. He felt pressure from his father to lock in an engagement with Diana, but, interestingly, the rejection doesn’t end the scene. It transforms before our eyes as Diana and Fayed’s friendship can live honestly in that hotel room. It’s refreshing, and it might be one of the most emotionally honest scenes in the entire series. That scene is something that Abdalla cherishes as it gives so much room to two characters who have so much thrust upon them before their untimely end.

“That was the last scene that we filmed,” Abdalla says. “It was a journey between us all, including Peter, to get that scene right that was really triangulating what we felt about them. There is what I call a “sacred duty” to this story and to them which millions of people have shed tears and still feel deeply about. There was a version of this scene where there was this awful rejection and feeling that felt it went beyond any form of lust or status. You wanted a moment of truth between these people before they say goodbye, and it’s about a dignity about an inner truth somehow. It’s a scene about their relationships with their families and helping each other face themselves with that balance of friendship with deep, deep love. It’s a beautiful scene, and I totally love it. We fought so hard for that scene.

“With the part with his father on the phone beforehand, it’s not unlike when a therapist tells you to write a letter but not send it. Somehow what you need is already there, and that’s what they do and hold that for each other. I remember that it was the last scene we shot, but there was one day that we had to come back. The space was still reverberating and resonating with that scene. No one really knows what happened in that space, but it’s where all the possibilities kind of came to a head. Peter made the bold move, as he often does, where he asks us to imagine that these people tell each other everything that they never had the opportunity to say to each other. He does it in Frost/Nixon too. We can’t help but wonder what they said, and how can I allow the thickness of the air between these people speak. Then I will gather the people who care enough about these characters to fight with me for us to really find what we think is the proper representation.”

The Crown is streaming now on Netflix.