The actor who played Diana in The Crown said the moments leading up to her death must have been “completely unbearable” after the cast reenacted the car chase through Paris that led to her death for the final season of the divisive royal drama.

The sixth season of The Crown deals with the weeks preceding Diana’s death, as well as the fallout, after a car crash in Paris in August 1997. The first instalment of the season is released on 16 November.

Diana, Princess of Wales’s final moments are portrayed by the Australian actor Elizabeth Debicki, who described feeling trapped during filming.

“You only have to be in a situation like that for a minute before you realise it’s completely unbearable,” Debicki told the Radio Times. “No one should ever have to experience what it feels like trying to get from one place to another, and to have this swarm around you. You feel very trapped.”

Debicki told the Mirror it was a “unique challenge” to portray Diana’s death, adding that she stuck closely to the writer Peter Morgan’s “emotional blueprint”.

“I think it’s a unique challenge as an actor, to portray those days,” she said. “It’s [Morgan’s] interpretation and it made emotional sense to me, so I clung to that. Because, obviously, it’s devastating and it’s fraught and we can never know.”

The show has been accused of blurring lines between historical accuracy and fiction, and has been criticised by the actor Dame Judi Dench for not having a disclaimer informing viewers that the show is, in part, fictionalised. Netflix has since added a “fictional dramatisation” clarification to the trailer of the new series.

Speaking as part of a panel at the Edinburgh TV festival, the series producer Suzanne Mackie said it was important the team behind the series were thoughtful and sensitive.

“The show might be big and noisy, but we’re not. We’re thoughtful people and we’re sensitive people,” she said.

“And so there was a very, very careful, long, long, long conversation about how we do it – and I hope, you know, the audience will judge it in the end, but I think it’s been delicately, thoughtfully recreated.”

Diana’s death, and the events surrounding it, eclipse almost everything else in the season, according to the Radio Times. The first four episodes focus on the weeks before Diana’s sudden death, and then the national mourning that followed.

The final six episodes, which will be released on 14 December, tell the story of the monarchy’s response to the death of “the people’s princess” , and finish with William meeting Kate, and Charles, played by Dominic West, marrying Camilla, portrayed by Olivia Williams, in 2005.