With The Crown’s final season, audiences bid farewell to its beloved characters, not least Princess Diana and her romantic link, Dodi Fayed, who tragically lost their lives in a car accident in 1997 and depart our screens midway through the season. The first four episodes of Season 6 take time to explore the relationship between Diana and Dodi, crafting an emotional arc leading into their untimely deaths. “Dodi is someone people didn’t know at all, and I didn’t know him,” says actor Khalid Abdalla (The Kite Runner), who portrayed the Egyptian film producer across Seasons 5 and 6.

Though Fayed died alongside one of the most famous women in the world, his loss received a fraction of the media’s attention at the time, a point that is explored in The Crown, which offers the perspective of Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed (Salim Daw) in the aftermath of his son’s death. Abdalla grew to understand the importance of his character as he took on the task of fully inhabiting the role. “In this process of exploring him and telling the story, I hope we take him somewhere he is mourned, where, in some way, he is put to rest, because culturally, something feels wrong; we never attended his funeral.”

Abdalla, whose performance has already earned him a Critics Choice Award nomination, shines brightly next to his co-star Elizabeth Debicki, who has received accolades for her portrayal of the late Diana, including the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series. “Working with Elizabeth has been one of the great joys of my career,” he says. “From the very first time we met in preparation for this, I breathed a huge sigh of relief to feel that we saw eye-to-eye on what we were trying to create. To find that space between what we both feel towards our characters and also what we feel towards their relationship was just an absolute delight and so deeply challenging, but also just loving and tender and so much fun.”