In her first leading film role, Sex Education star Emma Mackey steps into the shoes of the brilliant and tragic novelist Emily Brontë. Here, she chats to Stylist’s entertainment editor Christobel Hastings about portraying the wild side of the Wuthering Heights author – and why her period drama rips up the rule book.
If there’s one thing Emma Mackey’s titular heroine Emily Brontë is going to do in the new biopic Emily, it’s roll her eyes. A curate delivering a sensual sermon about God being “in the rain”, a feeble acquaintance requiring the assistance of multiple gentleman to climb over a stepping stile, her brother Branwell gleefully yelling “freedom of thought!” over the Yorkshire moors: all moments in which ladylike respectability gives way to a rebellious spirit. According to the 26-year-old French-British star, the facial expressions aren’t deliberate.
“That’s just my face, it moves a lot!” Mackey laughs. “There’s a lot going on.” If you’re a fan of traditional literary biopics, this should be enough to tell you that actor-turned-director Frances O’Connor’s new film is not going to stay faithful to the facts. “Usually there are rules. We are told that there are rules in filmmaking. And I don’t remember ever thinking, “fuck, it’s my close up and I’ve got to sit here and do this,” Mackey enthuses. “I was left freedom in those moments”.
It seems a fitting role, then, for a star who made her name as Maeve Wiley, the bad girl of Moordale Secondary School in Netflix’s hit sitcom Sex Education. Now, Mackey is embodying another rebel who refuses to conform to societal expectations in O’Connor’s debut feature, which dramatises the brief but extraordinary life of Emily Brontë. Best known for penning one of the most passionate novels of all time, Wuthering Heights, the most elusive Brontë sibling died from tuberculosis at the age of 30 just a year after its publication; but the new film posits that the author’s interior life was definitely colourful enough to have invented a gothic romance.
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CHRISTOBEL HASTINGS 