Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Britain’s great Oscar hope ..obsessed with murder
Crown star Emerald makes history with first Best Director nomination
proper psycho – a psychotic sexual predator. I am just so incredibly lucky that she was there and thought, ‘That’s our girl!’” Emerald’s film roles include Anna Karenina in 2012 and The Danish Girl in 2015, and she appeared in a number of TV dramas, before landing a role in Call The Midwife, playing Patsy Mount in the BBC hit from 2013 until 2017.
Emerald met Phoebe Waller-bridge in 2011 when they worked on the film, Albert Nobbs, and they became firm friends. She took on the lead writing of series two of Phoebe’s award-winning Killing Eve, starring Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh, when the Fleabag star stepped back in 2019. More recently, Emerald starred as Camilla in Netflix hit, The Crown.
Always fascinated by the Duchess of Cornwall, Emerald had asked her agent to look out for a part playing her. Emerald says: “She’s always struck me as interesting – so much is written about her, but little about her. I discovered how funny and brilliant she is.”
With a nod to her own background, she says: “I’m basically playing a chain-smoking posho standing in a corner making cutting remarks. So it’s not a stretch.”
Emerald will find herself at Sunday night’s Oscars – broadcast from LA and London due to the pandemic – with some other stars of
The Crown,
She’s a Trojan, working on 10 projects at once including Vanessa Kirby, 33, who played the young Princess Margaret, who is up for Best Actress for Pieces of a Woman, and the Queen herself, Olivia Colman, 47, up for Best Supporting Actress for The Father.
Phoebe, 35, has described pal Emerald as a “bloody Trojan”. She said: “She’s been working on about 10 projects at once since the day I met her.” Emerald wrote a ghostly best-selling children’s book series, Shiverton Hall, and an adult novel, dark comedy, Monsters, about a child obsessed with murders.
True to form, Promising Young Woman was shot in LA in just 23 days. Emerald gave birth to her first child just three weeks after filming and was back in the editing room three weeks later.
She once said: “Work, to me, is like a chocolate digestive – I can never just have one.”
Promising Young Woman is anything but sweet.
Emerald says: “I wanted to make the movie feel like I think a lot of our lives feel, which is that they are beautiful and they are horrific.”
PHOEBE WALLERBRIDGE ACTRESS