Mohamed al-Fayed Plotline in ‘The Crown’ Slammed as ‘Disrespectful’

This article contains spoilers for The Crown Season 6, Part 1, which debuted on Netflix on Nov. 16.

Mohamed al-Fayed is seen in The Crown pushing his son Dodi to marry Princess Diana so he can obtain British citizenship, prompting a former friend to tell Newsweek: “It’s easy to attack the dead.”

Part I of the sixth and final season dropped on Netflix on November 16 and charts Diana’s final days before the Paris car crash in which she lost her life in August 1997.

It has long been suggested that Princess Diana did not truly love Dodi and that their relationship was a summer fling.

However, the show goes a considerable step further, showing Dodi pushed by his father to get close to Diana, wrecking his engagement to fiancée Kelly Fisher, all out of the belief that the son’s new-found status would gain the father British citizenship.

Robert Jobson, author of Our King and a former friend of al-Fayed, told Newsweek: “To be honest, I think it’s disrespectful and it’s easy to attack the dead.”

In a pre-broadcast interview, Newsweek asked Khalid Abdalla, who plays Dodi, whether the plotline was unfair on the Fayeds.

“How many Arab characters in cinema on this side of the world can I think of who have been known a little, loved a little and, when they die, mourned?” he said, in reference to scenes in which Mohamed grieves for Dodi and asks why British newspapers were acting as if Diana was the only one who died in the crash.

Diana and Dodi: The Crown‘s Citizenship Claim Is ‘B*******’

Mohamed al-Fayed, played by Palestinian actor Salim Daw, is portrayed insisting Dodi leave the side of his fiancée Kelly Fisher to entertain Diana on board his yacht The Jonikal.

Fisher, clearly suspicious, eventually travels to join them and is confined to a separate yacht to prevent her spoiling the plan to seduce Diana.

Should anybody be under the impression that al-Fayed wanted only the best for his son, the show depicts him outlining how a marriage between Dodi and Diana would help him secure British citizenship.

Al-Fayed, a billionaire who once owned Harrods department store, twice had applications for U.K. citizenship rejected by the British government.

In real life, al-Fayed died three months before broadcast, on August 30, 2023, almost exactly 26 years after Dodi and Diana died from injuries sustained when the Mercedes they were passengers in hit the 13th pillar of the Pont de l’Alma underpass in Paris.

Jobson told Newsweek: “Its a bit unfair. I knew Mohamed very well, we went to see Fulham [the soccer club al-Fayed owned] in the final, he invited me to his private box and everything.”

On the acting performance by Daw, he said: “I thought he came across as he was really like, not in public but in private.”

However, on the plotline itself, he added: “I don’t think its true but I think Mohamed would have tried to manipulate the situation because he was a canny old f*****. He wouldn’t have pushed her to do it but he would have seen the opportunities involved.”

And he said the citizenship claim specifically was “b*******. To be honest he told me he’d never get that and he knew that as well. He wanted his son to be happy. He loved his son. He adored his family.

“Mohamed was a very different person in public compared to how he was in private. He was very funny in private amongst people who he trusted.”

The Crown goes as far as showing Mohamed call the cleaners to check whether Diana and Dodi had been “intimate” with each other before hiring paparazzo Mario Brenna to photograph them kissing on the yacht.

Without naming Brenna, Charles Rae, former royal correspondent at The Sun, told Newsweek he knew the photographer behind the pictures: “Well, I don’t know if it was Mohamed who called the photographer but I do know who the photographer was and I know he was called.

“He never told me who it was who called him. It could only have been Mohamed al-Fayed or Princess Diana. She could have done it because she would have wanted to show the royal family she was having a good time and enjoying herself.”

Khalid Abdalla Defends The Crown’s Mohamed al-Fayed Plot

When Newsweek asked Abdalla, who played Dodi, whether the plotline was unfair, he said: “No, one of the things that I feel is so important and was important for me right from the beginning about that dynamic—because many people have complicated relationships with their parents and clearly Dodi did—but it was so important to both me and Salim that that was a relationship of love.

“Of deep, deep love and in some ways the harder the more loving. It’s sort of, the contrast deepens that sense of extraordinary love which absolutely was there.

“And that’s something that me and Salim very much had our eye on the whole way through because tip it one way and it becomes something else.

“Mohamed al-Fayed died recently and the phrase that went round my head again and again as I contemplated it was that I hope my performance and what we’ve done together is the greatest condolence I could give him.”

And, movingly, he added: “It hit me under the current circumstances and I asked myself the question suddenly—and I’d never asked myself this question—how many Arab characters in cinema on this side of the world can I think of who have been known a little, loved a little and, when they die, mourned?

“Despite the number who have died and been killed in wars and otherwise over my lifetime, let alone my father’s and my grandfather’s. And this is one, it’s not the first but its one of the first, it’s one of them and a very deep one.

“And it’s one of the things that for me also gives me this strange kind of debt of gratitude also to Diana because I feel that her gaze towards people was always one that was really about the light inside them rather than their status or the color of their skin or whatever it was.

“And somehow that carries through in a way to here and I think it’s part of the reason she was so loved across the world and I think that is part of what is being affirmed here. It’s not a point of comparison, it’s that everyone has a right to be mourned. And in some way that sense of common humanity and love. It makes me very proud to be part of this season.”

And he said he felt a weight of responsibility in playing Dodi, knowing the audience will go into the series with a much less concrete sense of who he was compared to Diana, Queen Elizabeth II, King Charles III and the other royals.

“The whole thing has been an immense challenge and a great honor,” he said. “There’s a benefit and it goes both ways. If it’s a character who is well known, there’s benefits that come to you as an actor, there’s more material, there’s more footage, there’s more that maybe shimmers immediately for people.

“And then if it’s a character that’s less well known it’s something else, it’s like a discovery. I think in both cases there are benefits.

“For me beyond that particular kind of acting challenge there’s the cultural responsibility that hangs on the portrayal. He’s lesser known. Dodi is a figure who, despite the fact that for the last 26 years he’s been on supermarket shelves everywhere and in the public gaze, in the background people have known almost nothing about him. I think there are deep cultural questions about why.”

“One of the things I’m proudest of,” he continued, “is that finally after 26 years we get to know him a little. We get to love him a little and then finally when he dies after 26 years we can finally mourn him.”

Jack Royston is chief royal correspondent for Newsweek, based in London. You can find him on Twitter at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek‘s The Royals Facebook page.

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