Jeanna de Waal on Playing Princess Diana & Meeting Prince Harry on Show People

Jeanna de Waal may have been born in England but since she was a girl, she dreamed of life on stage in New York. As a kid, she would visit the Big Apple. “Our flight would land and we’d head straight to a theater.” She then added, "I didn’t know that Manhattan was bigger than Times Square.”

De Waal is getting ready to play Diana, Princess of Wales in the new bio-musical Diana, but she's had a rock 'n' roll career. She studied musical theater at the prestigious performing arts school LIPA—founded by Paul McCartney—and made her West End debut in Ben Elton’s Queen jukebox musical, We Will Rock You. Soon after, de Waal traveled across the Atlantic and made her Broadway debut as a replacement in American Idiot, playing Heather. After joining the Wicked tour in 2012, another big break came in Broadway's Kinky Boots, where de Waal stepped in as Lauren in 2014.

Now, de Waal is returning to her English roots, taking on the role of the people’s princess in Diana, a part she helped develop at Vassar College and La Jolla Playhouse. Recently, de Waal sat down with Paul Wontorek on Show People to talk about how Diana is a celebration of the late princess's empowering legacy. 

Here are a few highlights:

On visiting Broadway as a kid: "[My sister and I] were at a performing arts boarding school—just musical theater-obsessed, brutally obsessed—from across the pond. Our favorite holiday was coming to New York and seeing a bunch of Broadway shows. Sometimes the flight would land a little early, and we'd literally head straight to a theater and leave our suitcases in the lobby. [Broadway] has this exclusivity, like, 'What's going on in that place?' It really has the ability to create this enviable excitement. We were just desperate for it."

On that time she met Prince Harry: "I was at [LIPA] and over the holidays, I would cater for this very fancy events company. They paid very well, but you had to be based in London. I would literally go stay at a hostel in London and wait for the calls. One of the events was catering for the Royals, and I was personally in charge of making sure that Harry's glass was always topped up with champagne. He was very friendly, and he was the last person on the dance floor at the end of the night."

On how Princess Diana was misunderstood: "She had no support system. She was 19 [when she married Prince Charles], and I think she was often painted as silly or stupid, but she wasn't. She had very strong gut instincts about the Camilla affair before they were married, but how do you pause a roller coaster that's on all the news channels? There's memorabilia being printed, your whole family is set on you doing this—this could be the culmination of your life, everything you've dreamed of. But you have doubts. At 19, how do you stop that? She didn't have the strength, and she went along with it. She was left in the mess of what happens when something snowballs out of control. And there you are, married and alone in a castle."

On what she's learned from Princess Diana: "It was really up to her to find her strength. Everything that she became and is today was because she found that little nugget inside of herself to say, 'I'm not going to let go.' She molded that and grew to become this role model who is still very much in our zeitgeist today. [Playing Diana], it's helpful to be older than her when all this happened, so I could reflect on how complicated and challenging that must have been, considering how badly I handled my 20s with far fewer challenging moments."

Did you know Show People with Paul Wontorek is available as a podcast? Check it out on iTunes and Spotify.