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EMERALD’S LATEST GEM
CARING IN CALL THE MIDWIFE, FUN AS CAMILLA IN THE CROWN – NOW EMERALD FENNELL’S LETTING HER DARK SIDE OUT WITH A REVENGE MOVIE
Emerald Fennell suits her name. She’s a woman of many facets. Just when you think you know who she is, she changes. An internationally acclaimed actress as Camilla Parker Bowles in Netflix epic The Crown, she’s also a successful novelist and screenwriter with a soaring Hollywood reputation. Now, as well as joining forces with Andrew Lloyd Webber for a fresh musical take on Cinderella, she’s written and directed her first film, Promising Young Woman, and it’s set to be one of the most controversial of the year.
She has the cut-glass accent, booming laugh and commanding jawline of the public schoolgirl whose career began when she was spotted by a talent agent in an amateur production at Oxford University. But there’s an unexpected side to Emerald Fennell.
‘My outward reflection definitely isn’t what I feel inside, which is a sort of bag of slithering, cold, dark eels. I think that’s something a lot of people feel,’ she says during a Zoom call from her London home, sounding completely cheerful. ‘There may be a female thing... well, not to gender it, but I think there’s a feeling with girls and women that the darkness they carry must be kept very internal.
‘Inside I feel like a bag of slithering, cold eels’
There can be a strange juxtaposition between how we’re expected to look and feel, and what the truth may be.’
Emerald, 35, sprang to fame in 2014 as boisterous redheaded nurse Patsy Mount on Call The Midwife, who was in a secret relationship with nurse Delia (Kate Lamb). What few viewers realised was that Emerald was already a successful children’s author, writing ghostly tales of a deserted stately home. And in the midst of her starring role on BBC1, she launched herself as a horror novelist for young adults, with Monsters.
After quitting Call The Midwife in 2017, she wrote series two of the global megahit Killing Eve, taking over from Phoebe Waller-bridge when she left to co-write the latest Bond movie. Then came The Crown, with show-stealing scenes as Camilla with Josh O’connor as Prince Charles.
Now her first major film, starring Carey Mulligan as a traumatised barista who takes inventive revenge on men who prey on girls after dark, is here. ‘I’ve always wanted to direct. It feels as if everything up until now has given me the tools to do that – working with many talented people.
It’s been kind of life-changing,’ she says. ‘I started out writing books and moved into screenwriting, and whenever I’ve been on a set as an actor I’ve been actively learning about what the director was doing. Directing seems to me to be the ultimate way of telling a story, particularly if it’s something you’ve written yourself.’
Promising Young Woman is the blackly comic tale of Cassie, whose life is upended by an incident of sexual aggression just before the #Metoo days. It explores the themes of responsibility, sexual power, and a woman’s right to say ‘no’. The male characters don’t come off as shining knights, but Emerald is quick to say she doesn’t regard them as unadulterated villains.
‘I’m interested in good people who do bad things and won’t admit to them because it explodes their idea of who they are. Don’t we, men and women, all think we’re nice guys?’
Cassie trawls nightclubs and pretends to be drunk to get ‘nice guys’ to take her home. She waits for them to try to take advantage of her and then turns the tables, hurting them or scaring them into changing. ‘Everything we see in this film, we’ve seen in romantic comedies over the last 50 to 70 years,’ says Emerald. ‘It’s only when you look back through different eyes that you think, “Hang on, maybe this stuff isn’t so cool.”’ Emerald was born with not just looks and talent but a silver spoon firmly in her mouth, her father being famed society jewellery designer Theo Fennell. She says, however, that she was not named after the gem, but the 1930s society hostess Lady Maud ‘Emerald’ Cunard. In a curious foreshadowing of Emerald’s The Crown role, she was notorious for
encouraging her friend Wallis Simpson and Edward, Prince of Wales.
Emerald’s mother Louise is a novelist, her books including Fame Game and Dead Rich. Hardly surprising, then, that Emerald and her fashion designer sister Coco have become creative adults. After an education at Marlborough College (Kate Middleton’s school) and an English degree from Oxford, Emerald followed her mother into writing.
From the beginning, she says, she was drawn to the darker side of her imagination. Her first two books, Shiverton Hall in 2013 and its sequel The Creeper (shortlisted for the Waterstones 2014 Children’s Book Prize), were written for older children. ‘Children’s literature is already a shadowy place, filled with villains – the piper who lures children to their doom, the poisoned apple. It’s no coincidence the books we read as children are often frightening. They are what expose us to a world full of its own darkness.’
She thinks her third book Monsters, about a 12-year-old orphan fascinated by a series of murders, was even darker still. ‘The only monsters in it are human,’ she has said.
As an actress, her material has been less dark, though often tinged with sadness. It must have been something of a relief, even for her, to turn to the more free-spirited young Camilla. ‘She is great fun to play,’ she told me while filming. ‘She was funny and straightforward.’
Off screen, she’s fiercely protective about her private life – she has a child with her partner, director Chris Vernon – but she does admit that her relationship with her parents is close. ‘I stayed with them for four months when we came back from LA at the beginning of the lockdown. For a couple of years my life had been so busy I hadn’t seen many people I care about,’ she says. ‘Being forced to spend time with my family has been amazing.’
You can’t blame her, then, for taking things easier during lockdown. So is she planning to throw herself into a new project? Well, as she cheerfully replies... ‘Why not?’ ■ Promising Young Woman will be coming to cinemas soon.