Daisy Edgar-Jones and I are walking through Walthamstow Wetlands in North London, when our conversation is rudely interrupted by a goose. Standing at around two and a half feet tall, with pink legs, an orange bill, and a distinctly puffed-up chest, it walks – no, struts – up to us with alarming confidence, and fixes us with a very purposeful stare. We pause. “This is like, ‘You shall not pass!’” Edgar-Jones says, Gandalf-like and a little flustered. “Am I going to be attacked by a goose? Is that what’s happening?” Maybe we should try to match its confidence and barrel on past, I suggest. I begin to walk, but Edgar-Jones hangs back. The goose, perhaps sensing fear, hones in on her. She breaks out into a run, grabbing my arm as she catches up to me, then apologising for the intimate gesture. “Oh my God! I was going to [be confident], and then I panicked!” she says. “What the hell? It looked me right in the eye!”
Edgar-Jones was a relative unknown when she was cast as Marianne in Normal People, the thoughtfully horny BBC television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel about an undulating relationship unfolding between two sensitive teenagers, then young adults, in northwest Ireland. The book was widely loved, becoming an instant classic of millennial literature. The TV series was even more popular; it defined the first lockdown, and became the BBC’s most-streamed series of 2020.
We meet on a bright April afternoon, and the wetlands are both tranquil and bristling with life. Insects hum all around us, and there are geese and ducks waddling around the edge of the lakes, or gliding across the clear water, leaving V-shaped ripples fanning out behind them. Edgar-Jones arrives carrying an enormous black plastic bag under her arm. She’s just been vintage shopping, and has purchased a suede jacket that fits perfectly, but that she’s already having second thoughts about. She wears a forest-green shirt with a beaded collar, ripped jeans and a pair of brown and olive Chelsea boots that she jokingly refers to as “my fishing boots”. We’re at Walthamstow Wetlands, you see, because we’re going fishing.
We’re going fishing because Edgar-Jones is about to appear in another literary adaptation of another bestseller, Delia Owens’ part coming-of-age story, part crime thriller Where the Crawdads Sing. Edgar-Jones, who turned 24 in May, plays Kya, a young woman who is abandoned as a child and grows up in total isolation, deep in the marshlands of 1950s and ’60s North Carolina. The first scene she shot was a much-loved section from the book, in which a local teenage boy named Tate leaves a feather sticking out of a tree stump outside Kya’s house, as a gift – the beginning of a long relationship between the two young adults. “I knew lovers of the book would be thinking, ‘Oh, the feather stump scene!’ I’m a big reader, and I know that feeling when you watch something like, ‘Huh. It’s not how I expected it.’”
For the part, Edgar-Jones worked with a dialect coach on the North Carolina accent. A movement coach taught her how a child who had survived barefoot in the swampy terrain would move within it as an adult. She did her own stunts, diving into alligator-infested waters, and learned how to fish with a period-specific wooden fishing rod – good practice for our activity today.
“It’s so ironic that I filmed in New Orleans and played a marsh girl,” she laughs, having just screamed as she swatted a flying beetle away. She is not a fan of bugs, flinching at the various midges, flies and wasps that occasionally interrupt us. “I thought I had become more hardy since then – but nope.” When it comes to fishing, she is both enthusiastic and a little apprehensive, encouraging me to go first. When our instructor, Mike from London Fishing, offers to adjust the reel handle for her (she’s left-handed), she declines, but is eventually persuaded. Once we’re talked through the specifics of technique and bait – we opt for a lurid pink ball, raspberry and peach flavour – we cast off, and Mike sets our rods on a high-tech-looking rest that promises to beep at any hint of movement. From then on, it’s a waiting game.
We sit side by side in two folding chairs, looking out over the water. Joggers and children on bikes pass behind us; Edgar-Jones points out a bumblebee crawling in the grass. She explains that acting, too, is a career that requires patience, something she’s slowly getting better at. There’s the waiting to hear back after auditions, the pre-shoot quarantines during the pandemic, and the long wait for the film to come out. Actors are often “the last to see” something they’ve performed in, she says, so by the time she watches her own work, everyone else is, too. And that feeling – of being seen – is something she’s still getting used to, too.
Growing up in Muswell Hill, north London, Edgar-Jones lived with her mother, Wendy, an editor on TV dramas, and her father, Philip, then the creative director of Big Brother (he is now the director of Sky Arts, and head of entertainment for Sky). She spent much of her childhood immersing herself in imaginary worlds alone, or closely observing the grown-ups around her. As an only child, she explains, “You learn how to behave around adults from an early age. Because you’re not sat at the kids' table, you’re sat with the adults, being quiet and listening.”
Edgar-Jones started keeping a diary when she was 14. The first entry, she says, went something like this: “Hi, I’m Daisy. I have SUCH bad skin, and I don’t have a boyfriend. I like the colour green, and I love Coldplay.” She was a huge fan of Louise Rennison’s Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, and her entries were more than a little inspired by the book’s narrator, Georgia. “I still write that way in my diary,” she laughs. Reading old entries back, she’s struck by how her tone and her “silly anxieties” have stayed the same over the last decade. “I have not changed.”
Acting was one of the few things that made her feel confident. “When I was a teenager, I really believed in myself when it came to performance – in a way that I wish I actually still had,” she says. “I really was like: I know what I’m doing in this arena alone. Everything else, I don’t, really.” Even as a young person, Edgar-Jones was empathetic and curious about the inner lives of others, to the extent that it could be overwhelming, particularly in social situations. “I’m so concerned about how the other person is experiencing it that I’m not actually experiencing it myself.” Acting gave her an opportunity to explore those questions in a different context. “That felt very liberating.”
At seven, she was cast as Anne Boleyn in a school play – her parents were shocked to see their well-behaved, reserved daughter excelling as a furious wife, raging at Henry VIII. They began to take her love of performance seriously. She had her first professional audition aged 15, for a role in a new adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid. The film was never made, but she met her agent as a result and over the next two years, got her first parts in the BBC sitcom Outnumbered and ITV’s hugely popular Cold Feet.
All the while, Edgar-Jones was at school excelling in her GCSEs and A-levels. She ultimately decided against drama school or university, so she could focus on auditions. “It was quite an anxious time,” she says. “I was worried that my friends would come out of university and I wouldn’t be able to hold myself in conversation with them because I’d missed out on that. I was diligently listening to podcasts, trying to find interesting things to talk about.”
The next few years were the most “anxiety-making” – some small parts aside, Edgar-Jones struggled to get the roles she was going up for. Her confidence had been shaken. Then one day, alone in her North London flatshare, sitting on her bed, she got the call. She had been cast as Marianne in Normal People.
It’s a filming experience she now has great nostalgia for. She has stayed close to her castmates India Mullen and Fionn O’Shea, and her co-star Paul Mescal. “He’s just the best human being,” she tells me. “So kind, lovely and funny.”
Her first leading performance was watched by millions of people, who all seemed to be talking about it – an experience that was thrilling, and strange. “When you’re an actor, you want to act in a really brave way, free of worry about that,” she tells me. “The trick is not worrying – which I find so hard – if people like you or not. You’re always, always looking for the bad comment. We’re just wired that way.” Fortunately, her cerebral and understated performance was universally praised: as Marianne, Edgar-Jones’ face could hold barely concealed longing in one instant, then almost imperceptibly shift into an expression smarting from hurt. Even Edgar-Jones was happy with it. “I was really proud of the work I’d done in that show. I felt more confident in myself.”
After the extraordinary global success of Normal People, Edgar-Jones spent the entirety of 2021 filming three projects back to back. First, Fresh – a slick, genre-twisting film starring her and Sebastian Stan that begins like a rom-com before taking a sudden left-turn into stomach-churning horror. Then came the springtime shoot for Where The Crawdads Sing. Finally, she spent the autumn filming Under the Banner of Heaven – a true crime thriller that explores a brutal murder in a devout Mormon community in Utah – in which Edgar-Jones plays Brenda Wright Lafferty, a young, recently married woman who was found murdered along with her infant daughter in 1984.
With Normal People, Fresh and Crawdads, Edgar-Jones has now appeared in a string of atmospheric, intimate, often dialogue-light projects that focus on the twists and turns, the threats and pleasures of romantic relationships. She has played a number of isolated, lonely and often prickly young women, who often have a traumatic history of abuse. These are characters who at times want to take the risk of being seen and known by others, and at other times wish to retreat into the safety of a private inner world.
The director of Crawdads, Olivia Newman, remembers Edgar-Jones’ first audition, in which she reads aloud the names of her character’s long-lost relatives. “She had me in tears,” Newman says. “Everybody who watched her tape had the feeling that we were watching a movie star.”
Edgar-Jones’ recent projects were all directed, or co-directed, by women. Crawdads was executive produced by Reese Witherspoon, whose production company Hello Sunshine aims to “put women at the centre of every story.” Gender doesn’t factor into the actor’s decision making when choosing projects. Still, seeing women behind the camera has had an effect. She recalls watching Hettie Macdonald direct her and Paul Mescal for the first time on the set of Normal People. The scene in question – Marianne and Connell attending a protest against the war in Gaza – didn’t make the final cut, but seeing Macdonald at work struck Edgar-Jones. “I felt very moved by it,” she says. “The way she commanded the space… for the first time, I went, ‘God, I could do that, maybe.’”
Working with director Mimi Cave on Fresh was similarly instructive. “She’s such a master visually because she knows how to tell a story with a camera,” Edgar-Jones says. In the film, her character Noa has a weekend away with her new boyfriend Steve (Stan). To call it the world’s worst date would be an understatement. (He kidnaps and drugs her, locks her in a custom-built cell in his luxury house, and tells her he plans to sell her body parts as human meat on the black market.)
Before filming, Edgar-Jones and Cave discussed how to approach the material. In an early meeting, Edgar-Jones referenced Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ bestselling Women Who Run With the Wolves. “I was a little bit blown away, because she’s so young and it’s a book that’s been around forever,” Cave tells me. “She had this breadth of knowledge and was such a fervent reader and felt older than her years. I was like, this girl is smart as a whip, and she’s going to teach me a lot.” By the time filming started, Edgar-Jones had put together a file of information on her character. “She had done her own character trajectory,” says Cave. “She just does her homework.”
Fresh has a twisted sense of humour – in one scene, Noa bites off Steve’s penis. “It was on the call sheet as ‘Noa chomps Steve’s dick,’” Edgar-Jones says. “They used chopped-up peach and fruit for the flesh that I spit up.”
Like everyone else, Sebastian Stan watched Normal People in lockdown, and was moved by Edgar-Jones’ “authentic, complex, layered performance”. He signed on to Fresh once he heard she was attached to the project. “That’s what made me call my agent,” he tells me. “Daisy has such an inherent wisdom to her, a real intelligence that she exudes quite naturally. Her coming in to play that part said to me that this character Noa is going to be a very intelligent, smart woman, and therefore Steve would have to be intelligent and smart in order to match her. That made it exciting for me.”
Edgar-Jones’ director recalls a scene in which her character is allowed out of her cell to dine with Steve. While he goes on a self-centred monologue about his line of work, Noa feigns interest while looking for potential exit routes.
“If you watch that scene,” Cave says, “what you notice about Daisy’s choices are that they’re incredibly subtle. You almost can’t see them, but you feel them: you feel that she’s scared, you feel that she’s disgusted, you feel like she wants to run – but she holds it so much in her body that it makes the scene sing, because the tension is so high.”
Edgar-Jones describes Fresh as “an allegory for the commodification of women” as well as for “the disposability of dating culture – that feeling of shopping for a partner.” She and Cave had long conversations about how women are taught to dismiss their deepest instincts and fears in order to be polite. “We live with an awareness of threat that is just so ingrained and normal that you don’t even clock it,” she says. “It’s the risk factor of dating as a woman: worrying about wanting to be open to meeting someone new, but also being so aware of the risks involved in letting somebody in.”
She sees the stories she’s worked on as connected by their interest in the challenges and rewards of human intimacy. “I am drawn to watching relationships play out on screen and the dynamic. How different we can be with different people, and how much a person can affect your life – be it friendship or family or romantic,” she says.
In Crawdads, Edgar-Jones worked on a moment with her director that would communicate the growing connection between Kya and Tate. “We came up with this idea to have this moment where Kya finds a shirt of his and smells it,” explains Newman. “She is missing someone and realising that she’s falling in love. It’s this tiny little gesture, but Daisy gives it so much emotion that you know completely what’s happening in the character’s mind. That came out of her instincts,” she says. “She is a director’s dream of an actor.”
Another shared theme Edgar-Jones sees in her projects is “perception of self”. Kya from Crawdads begins to see herself as an outsider after years of being taunted as “the marsh girl”. In Normal People, Marianne “views herself as a very cold, unfeeling person. But she’s very sensitive. It’s so funny, how differently we can perceive ourselves, and how loud that inside voice can be sometimes.”
When Edgar-Jones found out she’d been nominated for a Golden Globe for Normal People, it was her first day on the set of Fresh. After a two-week long quarantine in Vancouver, Canada, she was reintroduced to human contact at 4am sharp, and was feeling anxious about debuting her American accent for the role. She was sitting in makeup when she heard the news. “I was like, ‘What?!’,” she says. “And then I thought, God. I’ve got to be quite good in this now. Oh Jesus!”
Her first scene was straightforward: her character Noa calls her friend and says she is going on a trip with her new boyfriend. But Edgar-Jones was so nervous that she repeatedly fumbled the line, her words running into each other like a multiple-vehicle pile-up. Cave was polite, but Edgar-Jones insists, “I could tell she was like, ‘Oh no…’”. (In the final cut of the film, Edgar-Jones is off-screen when she delivers the line.) “I was not… it was not good,” she says now, looking out over the lake.
Mimi Cave remembers shooting that scene, too. “She was very self-conscious that day,” she later tells me. “But she was totally in her head.”
Despite earning a nomination for one of the biggest prizes in acting that very morning, Edgar-Jones began catastrophising internally. She recalls thinking, “You know, maybe this is the end of my career. But that’s okay – it’s been good! I’m still young, I could retrain.” That night, she went home and wrote a diary entry. Those familiar anxieties came spilling out. Later, fishing her diary from her bag, she reads the entry out loud. “Today was my first day on Fresh and I got nominated for a Golden Globe. What the actual fuck? Filming was actually quite stressful, and I found it quite scary doing my accent. When I got home, there was no one to hug.”
“Oh God,” she says, blinking at the pages. “That’s terribly sad!”
Mike agrees to watch our rods while we go for a walk. Clearly, Edgar-Jones can view herself in a harsh light. As we circle the lake, a few minutes after our encounter with the goose, the conversation returns to insecurities. “I’m terrible with self-doubt,” she tells me. She is bright and cheerful as she tells me these things, talking quickly, and frequently trailing off before she reaches the end of sentence. When was the last time she doubted herself? “Probably this morning – buying that jacket! I was like, I think I’m way cooler than I am.”
The sky has clouded over, and Edgar-Jones takes her sunglasses off; I can see her eyes for the first time. “I’m just really self-critical,” she goes on, “and it’s boring! I’m trying not to be that way. When do you get to the stage of just being like, ‘It is what it is’? When do you get to that point?” She sighs. “I don’t know… some people just seem to be able to do that. I’m a very needy actor, I think.” Her worry, she explains, is, “letting people down. Being the reason something is bad. Or just not doing my best.”
These tendencies are particularly heightened when filming, when Edgar-Jones becomes hyper aware of the experiences and feelings of everyone else in the room. She finds it hard to disentangle her sense of another person’s general stress from her inner conviction that she must have, in her words, “fucked it”.
On set, she doesn’t watch herself back on the monitors (“That would prang me out way too much!”) but she is used to imagining herself as viewed by another – a director, a camera, an audience. Sometimes, when she’s not on set, just going about her daily life, she finds herself thinking: did that translate to camera? She wonders if everyone does this, to some extent, even those who are never on camera. Take two people stuck in an argument, who are no longer fully invested in the fight, but keep it going, staging a drama they’ve seen a hundred times before. “You’re both acting the argument a little bit,” Edgar-Jones says. She and her friends laugh at themselves for crying, and catching themselves thinking, “I wonder if this looks… really good?”
As we walk back towards our fishing spot, we discuss the art critic John Berger’s theory that men look at women, while women watch themselves being looked at. A woman, Berger writes in Ways of Seeing, is “continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping… she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.” Edgar-Jones says that men and women even look in the mirror differently, “More often than not, a man can see themselves as a whole. A woman will focus in on the tiny details, and won’t see her full face.” What does she see first when she looks in the mirror? “My mousta–” she laughs, not quite finishing the word. “No, no, no, my…” she gestures to her chin and jawline. “I used to suffer from terrible bouts of acne.” Her skin, of course, is flawless now – clear, with the glow of youth. But I’m realising her perception of herself is quite different to mine. I feel like I can see her then, if only for a second. Fourteen-year-old Daisy, who likes green, Coldplay, and has SUCH bad skin.
We arrive back at our rods, where Mike is diligently keeping watch for us. “Did we catch anything?” Edgar-Jones asks, hopefully.
“Not a sausage,” he replies.
A week after our fishing adventure, I catch up with Edgar-Jones over a video call – she’s now in Los Angeles, talking to me from a brightly lit hotel room, wearing a white shirt and patterned trousers that she refers to as her “party pants”. She’s there to promote Under the Banner of Heaven, and she’s also been catching up with her friends from Normal People for the first time since 2019. “I just spent the whole time hysterically giggling about how exciting it was to be together,” she says.
After finding fame during a pandemic, Edgar-Jones is only just now discovering the other side of being a Hollywood actor: the junkets and photoshoots. “It’s funny because press and whatnot is very you-centric,” she says. “But it is also really fun to dress up and go to these things. And I just love dancing.”
Still, feeling all eyes on you is “a strange feeling,” she tells me. “The best actors are the ones who are quietly watching and observing, the ones who are interested in looking outwards. It is funny then, when you become recognisable. In a way, you are the observed. That’s a really odd thing.”
But Edgar-Jones does deliberately observe herself, watching all her own work back once it’s been released – multiple times. Only after repeat viewings can she be “objective” about what she’s seeing, she explains, get past the self-criticism, her memories of filming, until she can “disconnect the experience of making it” from the final product. She does it to learn about filmmaking, because she wants to make them one day. “I don’t love watching myself at all,” she says, “but I really do ultimately want to branch out into directing.”
As a teenager, Edgar-Jones often imagined storylines for her favourite songs. She wrote out a story for Coldplay’s “Strawberry Swing”. In fact, becoming a music video director was her biggest dream, she says. “When I see Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Greta Gerwig and Olivia Wilde – all of these brilliant actors who are able to cross over,” she says, “I feel like maybe I could cross over into different sides of storytelling too, which is cool.”
In her imagined future career as Daisy Edgar-Jones the film director, she makes her debut with an adaptation of Jon McGregor’s 2002 novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. “It would be an impossible film to adapt,” she says, grinning. “Impossible – because it’s so internal. But I’m just fascinated by inner life.” Until then, she hopes to explore that theme in her performances. She mentions Tilda Swinton and Frances McDormand as two of her favourite stars: like them, she wants to become a “character actor”.
“She can do anything. She could be a Marvel hero, she could be in a broad comedy,” says Cave, who believes Edgar-Jones is just getting started. “I truly think any good artist always has a shred of doubt. But that comes in combination with an inner confidence you can’t teach. It’s almost like a compass – people who really know themselves have that. Daisy, more than a lot of people, she has that compass. [During shooting], I felt I was watching someone become great.”
For all her self-criticism, Edgar-Jones still has a fundamental belief in what she does, just as she did when she was a teenager. The pull of performance, she says, lies in the strange suspension of time that she experiences mid-scene. A film set is a chaotic place, but after the cameras start rolling, everything quietens.
“There’s a crazy…” she trails off. “I don’t know, it’s so hard to describe.” She pauses. “There’s a real moment of stillness, between action and take, that is just so thrilling. When you’re really connecting with an actor, and you’re listening to each other. It’s magical,” she says. “There’s just no better feeling.”
Anna Leszkiewicz is an associate editor at the New Statesman.
Where The Crawdads Sing will open exclusively at cinemas across the UK & Ireland on July 22nd.
Under the Banner of Heaven is coming to Disney+ in the UK & Ireland on July 27th.
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photography by Ben Parks
Hair by Eliot McQueen
Makeup by Zoë Taylor
Nails by Simone Cummings
Tailoring by Rachel Brown
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