Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
AUSTENTATIOUS!
The author’s mischievous matchmaker Emma is back in a deliciously comic and colourful new adaptation – and the cast say it’ll have us all remembering our first thwarted crushes
The cast of a flamboyant new adaptation of Emma reveal why we’ll fall in love with its heroine all over again
You couldn’t meet two more contrasting characters than Johnny Flynn and Anya Taylor-Joy, the stars of a sparkling new movie adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Emma.
The deliciously comic film is a feast of flamboyantly colourful sets, which is like ‘swimming in a giant cupcake’ according to Anya, who plays Emma and who today looks like a piece of exquisite confectionery herself in a pink and red frilled dress, with salmon-pink silk stilettos and huge gold hoop earrings. Meanwhile, quietly spoken Johnny, Emma’s love interest George Knightley, is happy to fade into the background in jeans, an open burgundy shirt over a white T-shirt and chunky brown ankle boots.
They look as unlikely a couple as Austen intended her protagonists to be in her treasured comedy about finding true love through romantic missteps. Yet there’s clearly a chemistry between singer-songwriter and actor Johnny, 36 – who’s the halfbrother of actor Jerome Flynn and who’ll play David Bowie in the film Stardust later this year – and English-American Anya, 23, recently seen as feisty Gina Gray in Peaky Blinders.
‘When I met Anya we did a chemistry test as she was already cast, so I was trying to impress,’ recalls Johnny. ‘We did a big argument scene and the hardest thing was getting my mouth around all the big words. But we loved the tit-for-tat scenes because they’re each other’s intellectual equals – that’s why they have this profound connection, which at first they mistake for a sort of brother-sister love.’
Like clever, rich, restless queen bee Emma Woodhouse, Anya is bursting to butt in. ‘You nailed it,’ she tells Johnny. ‘You were the only Knightley we wanted. The second you left we said, “He’s got to stay!”’
The 1815 novel tells the comingof-age story of Emma and her misguided matchmaking in the fictional village of Highbury. Her first project is to try to match her friend Harriet Smith (Mia Goth, best known for 2015 movie Everest) with the handsome but obsequious young vicar Mr Elton (Josh O’connor, Prince Charles in The Crown).
When this goes disastrously wrong she turns her attention to the affairs of others in her circle, including the dashing and devilish Frank Churchill (The Capture’s Callum Turner) and beautiful, bright Jane Fairfax (Amber Anderson, who appeared in JK Rowling crime drama Strike). Meanwhile, Mr Knightley, Emma’s friend and neighbour and a man of sound judgment, often locks horns with her over her interfering.
The film marks the directing debut of renowned US music and fashion photographer Autumn de Wilde, and she believes it’ll trigger memories in all of us of that best friend we could have kissed or didn’t realise we were in love with. ‘Having suffered so many crushes in my life, I’ve had a lot of experiences when I was younger where I thought, “Oh, he’s my best friend, am I in love with him?”’ says Autumn, 49. ‘Every cast and crew member had a personal story, and I think it’s one of the reasons this book is so iconic. Think of the film When Harry Met Sally – that’s Mr Knightley and Emma.’ Anya agrees. ‘Autumn understands female friendships and crushes, so there were moments when we could both go back and remember things like that first friend, where the relationship was so close it was actually something bigger than any kind of romantic relationship. You couldn’t define it.’ While Austen’s tale is ostensibly about navigating the rocky road of romance, it’s also about learning humility, and there are some aspects of Emma’s meddling that are a little unsavoury. ‘I had a hard time sometimes with Emma because there were moments where I didn’t want to admit I could relate to something she was feeling,’ says Anya. ‘I was remembering being 17 and making similar blunders, and so I was angry with Emma, but also angry at myself.
‘There are elements of Emma I have, and elements of Emma I wish I had. She’s secure in her intellect, while I’ve spent a lot of my life apologising for the way I am, and I’m trying to get out of that. So I aspire to be like her in some ways.
‘It was important to me that when she’s cruel, the audience can understand where she’s coming from and see she knows she’s made a mistake. I think everyone’s got a bit of Emma in them, or knows an Emma. Anyone who admits they’re wrong and chooses to learn from a mistake is someone to admire and look up to.’
This new adaptation of Emma follows the 1996 film starring Gwyneth Paltrow, and 1995’s modern, Beverly Hills take, Clueless, with Alicia Silverstone. But Autumn’s interpretation is infinitely more comic and exuberant, fizzing with wit and colour. Bill Nighy sports a duck-egg blue suit in his role as Emma’s grumbling father Mr Woodhouse, who’s constantly worrying about his health, while Emma dazzles in a mustard-yellow dress coat and blonde corkscrew curls among the bountiful pyramids of technicolour cakes and pastries. She
even wears a replica of the topaz cross pendant that Jane Austen’s brother Charles gave to his sister in 1801.
The supporting cast also includes Sherlock’s Rupert Graves and Game Of Thrones’ Gemma Whelan as Mr and Mrs Weston. Emma believes that their marriage, at the start of the story, is down to her, thus setting her on her matchmaking mission. Miranda Hart appears as Miss Bates, Jane Fairfax’s kindly aunt, and Tanya Reynolds, the daughter in Dawn French drama Deli-deli cious, is cast as the rich but vulgar woman Mr Elton goes on to marry.
Playing Mr Elton was an opportunity to relish for Josh O’connor. ‘He’s very theatrical, a sort of Laurence Llewelyn-bowen character,’ he says. ‘Everything has to be beautiful in his eyes because it’s all God’s work. It’s a comic role, which was exciting as I hadn’t had one since the TV series London Irish seven years ago.
‘I grew up as a Catholic, and at my church there was a priest who’d always talk with his palms up,’ recalls Josh, raising his palms to the sky. ‘If you bumped into him and said, “Where’s Sainsbury’s?”, rather than say, “It’s there”, he’d raise both his palms and use them to point you in the right direction. So we took this gesture as far as we could. We had a lot of fun with the madness of it… I’m sure our priest would be delighted to know!’
Josh and his gesticulations brought huge mirth to the sett. ‘I’d do some haam acting, and Autumn would have to say, “Josh, chill.” I spend so much time doing subtle, serious and sometimes bleak characters that being let off the leash was hilarious and she had to rein me back in at times.’
Tthere were also more poignant momments, such as when the earnest and kind-hearted Miss Bates is viciously put down by Emma during a picnic. ‘We all know Miranda Hart is hilarious, but when she gets bullied as Miss Bates it’s tragic,’ says Josh, ‘Everyone on set was crying. I grew up watching her on TV, but this was like a whole new dimension to her.’
It’s yet another tribute to Autumn’s casting. ‘I was very specific about it,’ she says. ‘I wanted everyone to be beautiful in a certain way and weird in a certain way. I wanted a strangeness to all the beauty. I’m a big fan of Bill Nighy because he doesn’t fall into the stereotypical traps of what a man of his age should do. He’s able to play wild and brave and fragile and broken. Mr Woodhouse is extraordinarily concerned about the health and safety of himself and everyone around him, but he also has tremendous energy when he knows what he wants to do. So I thought it would be funny to show he wasn’t fragile.’
Amber Anderson is an accomplished pianist but it took some preparation for her to play for real in the scene where Emma and her character, Emma’s love rival Jane Fairfax, have a battle to see who’s best on the instrument. ‘I had to learn how to play fortepiano, an early version of the instrument, but neither I nor the teacher the producers had hired to help me had ever played it before.’
Meanwhile, Gemma Whelan, who appears as Emma’s kind and practical former governess Mrs Weston, found her biggest problem was stopping herself eating the delicious food on set. ‘The attention to detail was incredible,’ she says. ‘The tables were laden with astonishing food, extraordinary prawns and aspic jellies, which was so over the top it almost became a character in itself. But we had to refrain as we had corsets and frocks to fit into!’
‘Everyone’s got a bit of Emma in them’
ANYA TAYLOR-JOY
Emma will be in cinemas from Friday 14 February.