When Khalid Abdalla was cast as Dodi Al Fayed in the final two seasons of The Crown, his first question was: What does Dodi sound like?
"That's a very big, simple question for me," Abdalla tells Town & Country. "Going into a read through, I'm like, 'Please someone give me a recording. Is there a recording?' The Crown will come out and millions of people will be googling, 'What's his real voice?' And you won't find anything on the internet."
Fortunately, The Crown's research team came through for Abdalla, surfacing a clip of Dodi calling into Larry King with an absurd question: He asks the legendary television host to ask his guest, Burt Reynolds, to do an impression of Tony Curtis's Cary Grant impression. Having trouble following? So was I. Quickly, Abdalla pulls out his phone, and holds it up to his camera on Zoom, to play the clip. I can hear King introduce Dodi, saying, "This is the man who produced Chariots of Fire, among other things. So what do we owe the pleasure of this call, Dodi?" Dodi replies, "Well, I found out that Burt's going to be on the show..."
Abdalla says, everyone who hears this clips has the same reaction, questioning, "'Wow, that's really what he sounds like?'"
"The question is, what's in that 'wow' really?" he says. "When you have this figure who you felt this familiarity to you for 25 years, but you don't even know what he sounds like. As a result, culturally you haven't mourned him. How can you mourn someone who you don't know?"
Abdalla says that taking on this role has been "a huge honor and a huge responsibility— both in relation to Dodi and what he means, and also in relation to the wound that surrounds Diana and the love affair that they had in the weeks before they died." Ahead of the premiere of season five of The Crown, Abdalla opened up to T&C about what it means to him to portray Dodi, falling in love with the character, and what he's looking forward to about season six.
What did you know about the Fayeds before being cast on The Crown? How did your knowledge base change as you worked on the show?
I knew very little, or I knew the basic stuff that people know. The truth is that I remember very little from the day that Dodi and Diana died, or even that summer—I'd taken a position of really not wanting to know more. I wasn't someone who would pick up the papers and read them.
But when I was asked to come in and meet Peter, I started ravenously researching. I had, I don't know, four or five days until I met him. I also hadn't watched an episode of The Crown at the time. I furiously started watching The Crown, but also researching Dodi and, I discovered, as I hope everyone will discover who watches this series, how little I knew.
I started to ask the question of 'Wait, how come I knew so little? What does that mean?' How can it be that Dodi's nickname has been on people's lips for 25 years and yet they know nothing about him?
To me, the Fayeds were far and away the most interesting part of this season because, as you said, even if the average person knows what happens to Diana and knows that Dodi was with her, I don't think that they know who he is at all. The Crown gives him voice in that way.
Exactly. And that's the thing that's a tribute to Peter and the team of The Crown. Since people have known that I'm playing this role, they've expected me to be the token Arab character who passes across the screen and is irrelevant. One of the great things about what's happening here is that the Fayeds—Dodi, Mohamed, and the family—are being treated with the same respect and cultural space that is given to other figures in the royal family. And that's exactly as it should be. Without that, frankly I wouldn't have done it. It's sad that's a surprise, but it's great that it's happening.
His story is often reduced to a part of in Princess Diana's, like "and Dodi died with her." What was important for you to convey about him this season, and in the next?
First of all, it is deconstructing this word "playboy," which is the only other thing that people know about him. Dodi is someone who had a lot of trouble holding down a relationship. The key dynamic in understanding that dysfunction—we call it dysfunction, I don't know if that's the appropriate word or not—but is really understanding his relationship with his father and his mother. His parents divorced when he was three. He was barely allowed to see his mother for most of his life. He went to boarding school early on and he had this complicated relationship with his father.
That creates the circumstances of this shy, awkward figure who lots of people fall in love with, and I fell in love with, but who doesn't hold down relationships—you do a lot of that and that becomes part of your character and then you get labeled playboy. But this image of him as the Hugh Hefner type is completely false. A lot of his friends in the '90s were saying, "But that doesn't sound like Dodi at all," and it wasn't. It's been really interesting exploring that.
The other one, and this is the one that really gets me on another level, is that he's described as a waste of space, someone who's a failure, and all these kinds of things. That comes from this patriarchal view of success; unless, apparently, he was like his father and owned Harrods, then he was a failure. I look at all the people I know in the world who haven't built Harrods, I don't look them as failures.
I'm sure, at some level, he felt that wounding. So unpacking that, and getting inside that, and creating this character who hopefully you love and who you begin to understand—and through understanding, begin to ask questions about the culture that we live in. That has been the joy of playing Dodi.
By nature, The Crown is inherently a very white story, but in season five, the Fayeds offer a non-white perspective on the institution of the royal family. How do you grapple with the Dodi and Mohamed's proximity to the royals, without ever fully being accepted?
They lived at a different time, and so they normalized different things that I don't think would be normal in the same way now. If Dodi and Diana had died now, you feel like the press would be at pains to recognize the racial dynamics of their death and to then go into it in a different way. There's complex stuff in relation to race going on, but I think we're still dealing with it now.
As you're working on season six, how do you prepare, knowing what's coming with Dodi?
The funny thing is that everyone focuses on the crash. And strangely, as a result, what they miss is this fabulous summer that Dodi and Diana had with each other. From an acting perspective, that's the real challenge—and that's also been the real joy to explore. They're falling in love, but you know what happened afterwards. You look at the images of Diana at that time, and she was really happy. It's been a real pleasure as Dodi, as a character who makes Diana happy, having those scenes with a happy Diana.
But I'm sad. I don't know how I will feel when I watch it, because my relationship with them now has completely changed. They've become people who I know more intimately than many others—from clothes, to humor, to certain aspects of them. I'll probably be associated with the word "Dodi" for the rest of my life.
What I hope will happen when people watch is that they will have a different view of this cultural wound, their death in that crash, that we've been aware of for the last 25 years. It stops being just a picture, and a distant memory that actually no one really knows much actually about, and it starts to become something fuller.
Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram.
