Emma Laird remembers a moment not so long ago when she was standing on the roof of her Los Angeles apartment building, smoking a cigarette and looking out at a picture-postcard sunset skyline.
“It was very cinematic,” she says. “And I had tears in my eyes.”
The Brit had called his agent, who told him that although he had made it to the screen test stage for HBO’s Gossip Girl reboot, the role was being moved elsewhere, even though it was the closest role he had ever gotten after months of hard-earned daily auditions.
“So I thought I was out of luck, so I tried it, but my visa expired and I was broke,” she says. “So I went back to London.”
Almost five years later, Laird is still in London. But she is now one of Britain’s fastest-rising young actresses, with an enviable range of high-profile projects already under her belt (The Mayor of Kingstown, The Brutalist, 28 Years Later: The Temple of Bones), and more on the way (Blood on Snow, War, Neuromancer). She is attending the Berlinale with her first lead role in the much-talked-about new series “Mint.”
But the almost comically down-to-earth 27-year-old is part of a dwindling number of British working-class actors climbing the call sheets, but he is not one to rejoice at his recent achievements.
“I’m always self-deprecating in my work,” she says, sipping a matcha latte at a cafe in west London, near the house she recently bought. “It certainly feels like a great trajectory, but I’m not confident enough to feel great. But I’m proud. I know when it’s good.”
And it was very good.
In stark contrast to LA’s rooftop scene, Laird had something of a career epiphany in sub-zero temperatures in Yorkshire. The moment happened during the filming of Nia DaCosta’s wild and gory sequel to the franchise, The Bone Temple, and her delightfully unflinching performance as Jimima, the most sadistic member of Jack O’Connell’s murderous wig-wearing cult.
“I just looked around and felt like I was living the dream,” she says. “I just saw this zombie apocalypse ruins set and was like, ‘This is really cool, this is what I want to do!'”
The blood-splattered screen star wasn’t on Laird’s list when he first started.
Spotted by a model scout at a music festival, at the age of 17 she packed her bags, dropped out of school and moved from her hometown of Chesterfield in northern England to London. “I was so focused on being successful,” she says. And she starred in numerous fashion campaigns (including one worn by Vivienne Westwood to the premiere of The Bone Temple) and magazine shoots.
But after six years as a model, she became disillusioned with the industry, unhelped by calls from agencies to “lose weight”. Having spent so much time around passionate and creative people, she was encouraged to give acting a try.
A few years later, Laird’s big break came in Taylor Sheridan’s dark Michigan-set prison drama The Mayor of Kingstown (which, in typical style, was booked a few months after her tearful return from Los Angeles). Her debut film, in which she played the role of a seductive escort alongside Jeremy Renner, was the talk of the industry. Variety magazine named her one of 2021’s British People to Watch. She was on vacation.
The Apple TV series “The Crowded Room” and the Agatha Christie all-star “The Ghost of Venice,” starring Kenneth Branagh, quickly followed, followed by “The Brutalist,” where she played the standoffish and possibly anti-Semitic wife of Adrien Brody’s cousin (a role, Laird says, after Brady Corbet accidentally stuck his finger in a door while filming “The Crowded Room”). Although she didn’t enjoy awards season success because she appeared in “back-to-back” roles, she claims that “The Brutalist” was “the first movie I was proud of seeing.”
The second was the “Temple of Bones”. But the film also helped ignite a thirst for something wild and strange, such as delving into the twisted child-mind of someone who “grew up in the apocalypse,” and the kind of daring roles that preparation could include.
In other words, Laird wants things to be bold, crazy, and loud in the future.
“That doesn’t mean you should scream,” she asserts. “But sensitivity is easier because you can hide behind it. On the other hand, when you make brave choices, you run the risk of making mistakes.”
Fame, awards, and recognition are all good things for an actress, but that’s not her focus at this point in her career.
“I knew she could do a beautiful performance like Jesse Buckley in Hamnet, but it was really amazing,” she says. “But what inspires me is watching people do crazy things. That’s why I want to make movies about fairies and wizards or weird shit. I don’t want to do Shakespeare, I want to play fish.”
Emma Laird in “Mint.” Provided by BBC Studios
House/Fearless Mind/BBC
Hollywood certainly has more literary roles than shady roles, but Laird is eyeing the possibility of joining HBO’s Harry Potter series as one of the underwater mermaids. (She claims to be a fan of the original movie and regularly watches it every night before bed).
But before he potentially attends Hogwarts in the future (we’ll have to wait a few years, as the merpeople don’t actually appear until the fourth book, Goblet of Fire), Laird has another TV series lined up.
“Mint”, which will be premiered in Berlin, is a work by fellow up-and-coming Brit Charlotte Regan (who made waves with her debut feature film “Scrapper”), in which she plays the lovesick daughter of a crime family in a uniquely styled and exquisitely shot drama. This time, she’s not on the sidelines wearing a blood-splattered jersey and fairy wings, but rather is at the forefront of the action, and it’s her first lead role, so she seems pretty anxious.
“I’ve done so much work and it’s been with these little cool characters,” Laird says. “And now I feel like people are starting to see me in things. It’s so scary. There’s a fear of what people will think when they see me.”
Laird admits that she has to overcome this fear, especially when it comes to taking on loud roles, as her “great trajectory” only seems to be on the upswing. Ironically, just a day after we met, it was announced that she would not be starring in a movie about Shakespeare, but as Daphne du Maurier in The Housekeeper alongside Helena Bonham Carter and Anthony Hopkins. But she said her research on the famous writer of “Rebecca” revealed that she was “loud and rich,” and that she aims to bring that presence to the set when filming begins later this month.
Laird is also well aware that had the phone calls about “Gossip Girl” (mixed reviews, canceled after two seasons) flowed in the other direction during a movie night on a Los Angeles rooftop, the show could have been in high demand, booked and the busy landscape could have been much different.
“I think it’s a good thing to remember: What you think you want may not be what you need,” she says. “You never know what’s going to happen, but everything worked out so well. And now I look back and think, how poetic, it’s just a beautiful memory.”
she laughs.
“But I do remember that it was probably the best cigarette I ever smoked in my life.”
