Elizabeth Debicki to star in World War II limited series about Australian spy

By Sam Barsanti | August 27, 2020 | 10:54pm

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Elizabeth Debicki to star in World War II limited series about Australian spy

Elizabeth Debicki Photo: Jamie McCarthy

According to Variety, Elizabeth Debicki (who some people in the world are seeing in Tenet and the rest of us will eventually know from playing Princess Diana on The Crown) is set to star in and executive produce Code Name Hélène, a limited series from Anonymous Content and a French production company called Vendôme Group. The series is based on Ariel Lawhon’s thriller book of the same name, and it’s about a real-life New Zealand-born journalist named Nance Grace Augusta Wake who became a spy and joined up to help the French Resistance during World War II. The show, like the book before it, will be broken up into “interweaving timelines” that each follow one of Nancy Wake’s four secret identities during the war.

In a statement, Debicki noted that Wake was “an astonishing New Zealand-born, Australian-bred woman of incredible courage, ingenuity, and wit,” adding that the story of her heroics in the war are “too little known.” Debicki, being Australian herself, says she’s “delighted” to tell this “utterly unique story.” You can read about her utterly unique story in the aforementioned book (or on Wikipedia) if you love spoilers, but it all sounds sufficiently exciting. She rode a bicycle behind enemy lines and apparently karate-chopped a Nazi to death with one hit, which is rad as hell. So yeah, this seems like it could be pretty cool.