Daisy Edgar-Jones: ‘It was great practice for Sense and Sensibility, all that time in Fermanagh fields with cows’
Six or seven years ago, Daisy Edgar-Jones, breakout star of the lockdown sensation Normal People , learned the Sligo accent so she could play Marianne, who’s coming to the end of secondary school there with Connell as Sally Rooney ’s story begins. Today, touching down in Dublin for the Irish premiere of a new take on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, the English actor is doing a decent approximation of Ruairí McSorley, the Derry lad known to TikTokers as #frostbitboy. She mulls over the geography of the line, which went viral after being filleted from a UTV news report in the winter of 2015: “Oh God, you wouldn’t be long getting frostbit.” Accents are not simply a sound, according to Edgar-Jones. “So much of an accent is also a sensibility,” she says. “I found it easier to understand Sligo because of the wonderful warmth and humour that I think is present in the Sligo accent.” The actor knows her Irish accents. Her mother, Wendy, grew up in Co Down, and Edgar-Jones spent childhood summers in Co Fermanagh with her extended family. She doesn’t get back much to Ulster since her grandmother died, she says, but her passion for the lakeland county remains. “I just remember things being so fun there,” Edgar-Jones says. “It was actually great practice for Sense and Sensibility, spending so much time in Fermanagh fields with cows.” It is a truth universally acknowledged that any Jane Austen novel must be adapted and readapted for screen. Purists may quibble over details – many pearls have been clutched upon sight of the hairstyles in the BBC’s TV version of Persuasion from 1971 – but the screen versions have brought the writer’s fiction to worldwide audiences. And at least some viewers have subsequently sought out the source material. The earliest BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, which was broadcast live, dates from 1938; every subsequent decade has yielded various Austen adaptations. The 1990s marked an upswing, with landmark TV versions of Pride and Prejudice (career-altering for Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle) and Persuasion (starring Ciarán Hinds and Amanda Root); two traditional Emma translations featuring, respectively, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Beckinsale, and a modern reworking of its story as Clueless, the 1995 film starring Alicia Silverstone. There was a Mansfield Park headlined by Frances O’Connor and Jonny Lee Miller. And, of course, in 1995 we got Ang Lee’s beautiful take on Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson and a rising Kate Winslet. “I think it’s because what Austen is exploring was really the stakes of a human life,” Edgar-Jones says. “And, even though so much has changed about the way we live today, inherently the way in which we love and feel heartbreak, and the anxiety of where you stand in society, and sisterly love, and friendship, and grief, all of those themes are ones we can still so relate to.” Decades after Firth sent pulses quickening, the vogue for Austen continues. In December, Netflix will drop a 17th major adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, featuring Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden as Elizabeth and Darcy. For now, enthusiasts have the latest Sense and Sensibility, a classy, tactile retelling from Georgia Oakley, the acclaimed queer film-maker behind Blue Jean , the 2022 drama about Section 28, the British legislation that in the late 1980s banned local authorities from “promoting” homosexuality – which was to say treating it as socially acceptable – with knock-on effects on schools. (The laws were repealed between 2000 and 2003.) The new film was a production defined by female energy, Edgar-Jones says. “On our final day, when we wrapped, we had a big hug,” she says. “It was me, Georgia, our female cast, our two female producers, our writer, our incredible production designer, our costume designer. This film, amongst many things, is about the true love story between sisters and the love between them and sisterhood. It’s a very special thing to have that on screen and off.” Austen’s plot, adapted by Diana Reid, is evergreen. After the death of the paterfamilias, the fortunes of the Dashwood family are, well, dashed. The grief of the family matriarch – played by Caitríona Balfe – and her three daughters is compounded by the knowledge that their older half-brother and his insufferable wife, Fanny (Stacy Martin, having a ball), will inherit the house and everything in it, leaving the women to face an uncertain future. Elinor, the eldest daughter, whom Edgar-Jones plays with layers of hidden feeling, is the embodiment of restraint: intelligent, practical and determined to keep herself in check. Her younger sister Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) could not be more different. Passionate, impulsive and fiercely romantic, she believes love should be absolute and refuses to settle for anything less. Eleven-year-old Margaret, as charmingly played by the young Irish actor Bodhi Rae Breathnach, would rather stain her face and dress with berries than endure the endless rules and conversations of grown-ups. Edgar-Jones loved those berry stains. “Every single day I looked at the set, and I would look at the props, and I would look at the costumes and just be so aware of how special movies are and the way they bring together such a multidisciplinary group of artists that have all different kinds of craft. It was so fun to be a part of it.” As Austen fans know, Sense and Sensibility really gets going when the women lose their ancestral pile. Enter an uproarious Fiona Shaw as a loud, generous relative who offers the Dashwoods a country cottage. Before leaving, Elinor grows close to George MacKay’s Edward Ferrars, the shy but charming brother of her formidable sister-in-law, Fanny. There is an unmistakable connection between them and Elinor begins to hope that Edward might finally declare his feelings. Instead, he departs to London, leaving Elinor waiting for word. On the upside, the Dashwoods make some fascinating acquaintances at their new cottage, including the brooding Colonel Brandon, a wealthy and reserved older gentleman whose quiet admiration for Marianne is obvious. She, however, is taken with John Willoughby, a dashing, handsome and charismatic gentleman caller who seems to have stepped straight out of her romantic fantasies. “I remember reading a line in the book that said Elinor is full of sensibility; she’s just learned how to govern it. And so that, for me, was a real North Star. There’s a constant tethering of her emotion, because she’s not wanting to take up that space. I never wanted her to feel passive. I really wanted her to feel like she was in this struggle of leashing her accessibility.” Edgar-Jones, who was born and grew up in London, is the daughter of the Scottish media executive Philip Edgar-Jones, the commissioning editor behind Sky’s Saturday Night Live UK, with a history of credits stretching back to Big Brother and The Big Breakfast. Daisy, however, was unfamiliar with TV and movie production until she began carving out an acting career. “My first time on a set was my first job,” she says. “I was 16 and we were shooting in Bulgaria. I remember looking around and thinking, ‘This is really cool: I could do this.’ I spent a lot of my life as a kid being very curious about how everybody else was thinking and feeling about a situation – ‘Gosh, if I were this person, how would I respond?’ And suddenly that’s my job.” The bug bit early. When she was seven she won an ice-skating contest dressed as Macavity from the musical Cats. At school, a production adjacent to the musical Six invited the unfortunate wives of Henry VIII to confront their sometime spouse. “I had to storm in and basically give him a piece of my mind. I remember the liberation I felt being able to be that larger-than-life, extroverted and raging individual that I found hard to be in my own life.” Edgar-Jones trained with the British National Youth Theatre before landing a recurring role in the 2016 reboot of the ITV drama Cold Feet. Subsequent work on the HBO series Gentleman Jack and, alongside Gabriel Byrne, two seasons of War of the Worlds had already flagged her as a star on the rise when the BBC and RTÉ adaptation of Normal People, directed by Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald, landed with enough cultural force to create a cult out of even the jewellery Paul Mescal wore around his neck. “It still is the thing that people recognise me for,” Edgar-Jones says. “It still is the thing that people walk up and say, ‘I love that show.’ And I love it too. I feel very grateful that that is the thing that has been following me around. Because I’m still excited about it. It was a special show made by very special people, and I felt very special making it. I’m very lucky.” The actor has been canny in the wake of the celebrity bestowed by Normal People. In the wildly entertaining dating horror-thriller Fresh , she went dark and genre-driven, playing a woman caught in an increasingly disturbing cannibalistic nightmare. Under the Banner of Heaven, a starry adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s bestselling chronicle of a double murder that screened on Disney+, steered her into serious crime drama. The 2024 disaster movie Twisters , which grossed more than $370 million – almost €350 million – proved her worth as a popcorn-movie headliner. Edgar-Jones has simultaneously maintained a literary bent with roles in big-screen adaptations of the hit novels Where the Crawdads Sing , On Swift Horses and, of course, Sense and Sensibility. She has always been a bookworm, she says. “Reading’s always been something I loved, because of the way you get to step into somebody’s inner life. That’s what I enjoy most about being an actor, too.” Edgar-Jones is in demand. In January she was unveiled as a face of Estée Lauder cosmetics; she also wrapped production on Here Comes the Flood, a heist thriller from Fernando Meirelles, the City of God director, that also stars Denzel Washington and Robert Pattinson. Early next year she’ll play a younger rival to Michelle Williams’s veteran lawyer in A Place in Hell. Edgar-Jones was astonished to learn that Williams never watches her own films. “I don’t love watching myself either, to be honest,” she says. “But I always want to watch because I want to be able to say well done to everybody else who was involved. Because I’m actually just one cog in a very large machine, so I always want to be able to say, ‘Congrats, costume’, ‘Congrats, camera’, or whatever. “So much of a film is in the edit, and as that is somebody else’s choices you can’t change anything. It’s a hard battle between your expectation: the take they used and the take you thought they’d choose.” All that makes sense. An actor has to let go. But it’s unusual for an actor not to give the work a glance. “I remember saying, ‘Haven’t you seen Blue Valentine ?’. And she’s like, ‘Nope’. She’s missing out, right? It’s great. But I get it. At that point, you’ve done your work.” Sense and Sensibility is in cinemas from Friday, September 25th