Emilia’s trek from Shrek to Tinseltown
EMILIA JONES was nine when she made her professional stage debut in the musical Shrek, with the show’s star Amanda Holden watching over her like a benevolent fairy godmother. A decade on, she’s now the star of a Hollywood film, giving a performance that will put her in the thick of the upcoming awards season.
London-born Jones appears with Oscar winner Marlee Matlin, playing her mother, in Coda — a picture that has already garnered her acclaim ahead of its opening here next week.
She plays Ruby Rossi, a teen who is the only hearing member of a deaf family.
Not only did Jones have to master American Sign Language (ASL) for the role, she also had to skipper a fishing boat — and take singing lessons.
The first time Emilia bonded with her screen family — Matlin as mum Jackie; Troy Kotsur, playing dad Frank and Daniel Durant as brother Leo — it was on the high seas off the Massachusetts coast. At four in the morning.
‘The first time I met them was on a fishing boat,’ she told me. Director Sian Heder (co-writer and producer on Netflix hit Orange Is The New Black) was striving for authenticity and insisted her stars went and caught fish for real... at the crack of dawn.
As an animal lover, Emilia found the experience upsetting. ‘I’d rescue a fish and the real fishermen would turn around, shake their heads and say: “That’s money”.’ It didn’t take her long to find her sea legs, though; and soon, she was grading cod like an old hand. The crew taught her to check the lobsters, to see if any females had eggs. Those that did, were thrown back into the briny, which made her happy.
Emilia was less sure about the singing. In the film, Ruby joins the school choir club as a way of getting a breather from her family. And while Jones can sing — ‘I sang in Shrek,’ she said; ‘I’m singing around the house, and I was in the choir at school’, she’d never had any training. ‘Which was daunting.
‘I was 17 when I shot this movie. I was a little bit nervous, and that’s the same as Ruby. She’s not very confident when she sings — she’s confident when she signs. I related to her in that respect.’
For her audition, Emilia performed Fleetwood Mac’s gentle ballad Landslide, accompanying herself on guitar.
However, when she arrived for her first singing lesson, in between shooting Locke & Key for Netflix (she’s been filming the second and third seasons backto-back in Canada) she was given belters by Etta James and Aretha Franklin.
The training has certainly paid off. Jones’s portrait of a young woman trying to gain independence from a family she adores is one of the year’s best. When the Sundance Film Festival awarded Coda (Children Of Deaf Adults) its top prize in January, the judges singled out the power of Emilia’s acting. There are many superb moments, but one that stuck with me is when Ruby sings Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now for a university panel. As she performs the number she begins to sign the lyrics to her family, who have crept in to watch.
She said her dad has seen the film several times, and been moved to tears on each occasion. He happens to be Aled Jones, who found fame as a gifted boy soprano and later as a TV presenter, recording artist and performer.
But despite coming from ‘a musical household’ (during lockdown, once it was safe, she and her dad went on drives ‘where we sang together’) Emilia never considered a career in that field. ‘My heart was always in acting.’
Coda, it seems, was the first time she realised she might be able to do both.
Both her parents — Aled and her mum Claire Fossett Jones — are proud ‘that I took on this big film on my own’, she told me, in a video call from Los Angeles. She reckons she inherited the determination to do that from them. ‘My mum is quite shy, but she was in the circus when she was younger. She did the trapeze — she had to be strong to do that. And my dad worked from an early age. We have that in common.’
Once she wraps on Locke & Key next month, she’ll start shooting the film adaptation of Kristen Roupenian’s short story, Cat Person. The piece went viral when it was published in The New Yorker in 2017. Emilia will play Margo, a 20year-old student who becomes involved with an older man, Robert (Nicholas Braun — cousin Greg from Succession).
‘Cat Person touches on the grey area of consent,’ she said. ‘It’s different to anything I’ve done before.’
■ Coda will be in cinemas and on appleTV+ from august 13.