The royal family, Morgan said, “is like a shadow family for everyone, which is why people have such strong opinions. And it’s right and proper that a dramatist writes about kings and queens and leaders. It has historically been what we do to make sense of the world.”
Over almost a decade, the show has made stars of its young actors, among them Claire Foy, Vanessa Kirby and Emma Corrin. “It changed my life,” Kirby, who played a young Princess Margaret, wrote in an email. Morgan, she said, “understands how to paint arcs, deep emotional journeys — no matter how big or small the part.” Morgan, she added, always encourages “the unpredictable, the complex, the challenging.”
Khalid Abdalla, who plays Dodi, Diana’s boyfriend, in Seasons 5 and 6, said that before taking the role, he had been uninterested in watching a show about the royal family. But once he joined the show, he said, he was “amazed by the way Peter gives a point of view you hadn’t had, and makes you rethink what you thought you knew.”
When it came to the characters of Dodi and his father, “it was moving that he gave the al-Fayeds a cultural space for their grief,” Abdalla said. “There is a blindness to that side of the story that needs to be called out and recognized, and Peter did that.”
For each season, Morgan spent at least six months working with a core team to create a detailed timeline of the relevant time period, with a research team providing documents, photographs and other background materials for every scene. “I love playing with stories like a jigsaw,” he said. “I am very specific and detail-oriented; if I were a doctor, I would be an elbow man!”