Bright star
SUNSET SONG | Now working with A-list directors, Agyness Deyn is proving to be a model actress...
As a fashion model, she was a cover girl for Vogue and dubbed “the face of a generation”. But Agyness Deyn’s movie career is now looking just as bright.
After winning plaudits as an epilepsy sufferer in Electricity, this winter, Deyn takes the lead in Terence Davies’ already-acclaimed period drama Sunset Song before hooking up with the Coen brothers for their all-star Hollywood comedy Hail, Caesar! “With Sunset Song, I read it and I felt like ‘I have to do this’,” says the 32-year-old Brit. “I feel like you have to feel that way, rather than getting something and then being: ‘How am I going to do this?’”
Shooting for months in New Zealand, Scotland and Luxembourg, the Rochdale-raised Deyn plays Chris, a beleaguered farmer’s daughter living in rural Scotland in the 1900s. The experience was transformative, she says. “It did change the way I did things.”
Now things have started to “percolate” for her, as she puts it. Not least booking a role in the Coens’ Hail, Caesar! – alongside George Clooney and Scarlett Johansson – as Allegra, a 1950s starlet. “I’m obsessed with their films and when you meet them, you just realise why they have such greatness. They’re just so relaxed and so very clear and direct. It was so chilled. We finished early… they didn’t just burn you out. They were like, ‘We got it. Did everyone feel good? Yeah? Done!’”
Since shooting Hail, Caesar! – “10 minutes from my house!”, on the Warner Brothers backlot in LA – Deyn has been working back in Europe, filming sci-fi/horror Patient Zero, with Matt Smith, and shooting dystopian drama The White King with Jonathan Pryce. “I love learning from people,” she says. “I’m like a sponge. I get so inspired.” The way she’s been soaking up roles, she must be full to the brim right now. JM
ETA | 4 December Sunset Song opens later this year.