Daisy Edgar-Jones: ‘When you get famous, it’s a funny concept to get your head around’

“It’s certainly been a wild few years,” says Daisy Edgar-Jones, neatly summing up life since Normal People. She’s sitting in the five-star Rosewood Hotel in London’s High Holborn where, in a nod to Wimbledon, yellow tennis balls have been hung like bouncy fruit in the courtyard’s lush green trees.

She is wearing a ruffled white shirt with blue jeans as she reflects on the post-Normal People personal and professional whirlwind. The success of Lenny Abrahamson’s TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel, a source of pandemic pride in Ireland as well as lockdown catnip for millions around the world, meant she went from young jobbing actor to instantly recognisable name overnight.

“It’s strange when you go from being just Daisy, to being a full name, to being Daisy Edgar-Jones,” she says, while discussing the experience she shared with her friend Paul Mescal, who played tongue-tied Connell to her spiky Marianne.

We’ll talk more about Mescal and Normal People later but she’s here, with earrings from Tiffany & Co and that deeply familiar dark brown fringe, to promote the movie adaptation of another beloved book, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. Though first published in 2018 with a tiny — and as it turned out deeply pessimistic — print run of 28,000, the book went on to sell nearly 5 million copies, gaining even more momentum during the pandemic two years after its release.

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At a time when we couldn’t go anywhere, this escapist, immersive novel about a girl who grew up mostly alone in the marshes and swamps of North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s struck a chord. A first novel for 70-year-old Owens, a zoologist and scientist, it told the story of Kya who is abandoned, first by her mother who is escaping domestic abuse, then by her older siblings and finally her violent father. She is left without any formal education to fend for herself, relying on the ebb and flow of the nature that surrounds her to understand life and ultimately scrape a living and survive. She becomes an outcast from society, reliant on the kindness of shopkeepers Mabel and Jumpin’, while whispered about and ridiculed elsewhere in the local town of Barkley Cove. Interrupting this lonely existence are two intense romantic entanglements with local men Tate and Chase, played in the movie by Taylor John Smith and Harris Dickinson. A gripping murder mystery plot thrums away in the background.

Edgar-Jones is mesmerisingly good as Kya, imbuing the role with an intoxicating mix of grit, wonder and vulnerability. Those expressive brown eyes we admired in Normal People, variously throwing daggers of disappointment or devotion in Connell’s direction, flash with wonder and a survivalist spirit as she steers her boat through the swamps. A champion diver in her youth, she did most of the stunts — in alligator-infested waters — herself. “That was fun,” she smiles. She read the book “over and over” to prepare for the role, even trying her hand at painting. Kya is a skilled illustrator of the feathers, shells, birds and other creatures she encounters.

Crawdads was filmed over five months last year in marshland around New Orleans. “Kya lives and survives in this quite sort of dangerous, perilous landscape which is a great backdrop for the murder-mystery aspect of the story but it was also quite beautiful. There were massive egrets flying above and snakes and dragonflies. You couldn’t really ignore the nature.”

Her voice as Kya is lyrical in that way of the American deep south. She has a natural gift for accents, helped, she says, by growing up around a Scottish father and Northern Irish mother. Her natural voice is a mix of English and Irish tones; she says “wee” sometimes instead of small. Reese Witherspoon, the Oscar-winning actor who co-produced Crawdads with Lauren Neustadter, has described Edgar-Jones as “a once in a lifetime talent. She can morph herself into so many different characters... I’m pretty tough on southern accents and Daisy just fell into it so beautifully with a real respect for the language.”

Crawdads is a story of female empowerment as much as anything else. No matter what happens, Kya refuses to be broken or beaten down. Did that appeal? “I am always keen to play characters that are complicated and who represent real women and not just there to serve a man’s story. I want the characters I play to be truthful to the women I know. And the person I am.”

Director Olivia Newman assembled a predominantly female production crew, including director of photography Polly Morgan and production designer Sue Chan. Edgar-Jones appreciated the novelty of that. “When we were filming, all the heads of department were mostly women, which I’d never experienced before. So it was really cool as a young actress and exciting to see all these women be completely in their power. It worked for the story too, because it’s the story of somebody who can’t be put into a box. And despite everything, is able to survive and thrive. I think it was really important to have representation behind the camera in that way.”

Something common to most of her roles so far, from Marianne to Kya to Brenda Wright (the Mormon fundamentalist played by Edgar-Jones in the crime miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven), is that they are outsiders.

“Maybe people sense that in me?” she laughs. “But I think we’ve all felt like an outsider at times. It’s a very human experience. I’m drawn to those characters, but I am also drawn to stories that celebrate profound relationships that come into our life. Marianne, at the end of Normal People, talks about how Connell completely changed her life and did so much good for one another. I think it’s the same with Kya. Although she’s isolated, she has these profound connections with Jumpin’ and Mabel and they fundamentally shape her life and who she becomes. I fundamentally believe that is what life is about really, the people that come into it and who change your course.”

This feels like a good time to bring up Paul Mescal. “He’s one of my best friends in the whole world and always will be,” she says. “I can’t put it into words how much I loved working with him and I’d love to again. For both of us [Normal People] was our first lead role, we were excited and also terrified. Talking about people who come in and change your life, all the people on that job made me who I am and I’m just so grateful.” She reunited with some of the cast including Mescal at Glastonbury in June. “We still get so excited and giddy when we’re all together.”

Edgar-Jones’s experience of auditioning for Crawdads closely mirrored her Normal People audition in 2019. Then, she was working on the first season of TV show War of the Worlds, in which she played Emily. She co-opted her friend and castmate Bayo Gbadamosi to read Connell’s lines and it must have gone well, because as we know she landed the part of Marianne. Almost exactly a year later, when working on the second season of War of the Worlds, she was asked to do a self-tape for the part of Kya. “I was like, come on Bayo, sorry, but it worked the first time. So he played Tate and Chase and I read the book while sitting in a spaceship.”

Playing beloved characters such as Kya and Marianne in film or TV, characters readers already have a relationship with, is something Edgar-Jones agrees adds another layer of pressure to a role. She contrasts that with playing Noa in her first feature film Fresh, a blackly comic thriller which premiered earlier this year at Sundance Film Festival.

“I had a very clear idea of who Noa was when I read the script, but it also felt good that if I didn’t quite get the character no one would know. So there is definitely an added pressure, especially when for both Where The Crawdads Sing and Normal People you know the characters are so loved and you do feel a responsibility to get them right. But with Crawdads, I also knew that having had the experience of Normal People, so much of film-making is a collaborative process. The acting is a tiny part of it. A lot of the performance is crafted in the edit, and with costume and in the camera work. So it’s a very nice feeling to give myself over to this team and this project and just to enjoy the collaboration. And all of us are trying to do our best and we’re all in it together.”

Making Normal People was “life-changing”, she says. Among other accolades, it earned her a Bafta nomination and a Golden Globe. She turned 21 the week before filming began and when the show was released we were in the middle of the pandemic. As a result, she feels she was somewhat cosseted from the intensity of sudden global fame.

“When it came out I didn’t actually have any real real-time experience of it because I was still just locked in my house watching Tiger King. So it was a really slow sort of introduction [to wider fame]... and I guess it meant that I was able to really focus on what mattered, which was the experience of making something... then I went away to work and I was just sort of in various different Covid bubbles. So, again, I didn’t have really much interaction or experience of it. But now that the world has opened up a little and I’m more able to be around people a bit more now, I can really feel that.”

She has experienced, as many of us have, the telescoping of time. “The show came out two years ago now, which is wild, that time has flown. I don’t feel like I’m 24, but I am. Two years have passed, and people still want to talk about the show. And we’re still talking about it now. It’s really special because that show means everything to me. So to be able to meet people who loved it, and connected with it, is actually just lovely. And all my interactions have always been really positive.”

Mescal, by contrast, has deleted his Instagram account describing it as “a drain” and in an interview once described his experience of sudden fame as “brutal”. “At first you think, ‘Oh, this is a bit glamorous,’ when someone is taking a picture of you buying ready-to-eat avocados and cigarettes at the off-licence, but soon enough you feel it begin to infiltrate your brain,” Mescal has said. “Just bulls**t like caring what I was wearing before leaving the house. As an actor I think you need to remain fairly anonymous and I found the lack of anonymity difficult.”

“I love acting because I like disappearing,” says Edgar-Jones. “I like thinking somebody’s else’s thoughts and departing from myself. And so when you get famous in any way, it’s a funny concept to get your head around. But I think if you have great people around you, who see you as you are and who will always see you that way, then you will be fine.”

She is the only child of parents who have both worked in the film and television industry; her mother Wendy Edgar worked as a film editor and her father, Philips Jones, is director of Sky Arts and head of entertainment at Sky TV. Did it help that they were familiar with the industry? “Well, they both understood what it is to be self-employed, which is very helpful when pursuing acting,” she says. I ask what qualities she shares with them. “They are both very kind people and don’t take themselves too seriously. Those are qualities I would like to have. And they are both very empathetic, which is also a handy quality as an actor.”

It was her mother who suggested she audition, aged 15, for the National Youth Theatre after seeing her shine in school plays where she was cast as Peter in Peter Pan and Alice in Alice in Wonderland. “It was an open casting that came online. I think of it as a sort of sliding doors moment. My mum saw something in me and said you should audition for that so I did. And when I got it the casting director knew an agent who was looking for a young actor to take on and I signed with Chris [Christopher Farrar of Hamilton Hodell]. Meeting him changed my life because it meant I was able to audition for things and be seen.” She was cast in TV shows such as Cold Feet, Outnumbered and Gentleman Jack before she won her first lead role in Normal People.

Growing up in London she says she always felt sure of herself while acting. “I always felt confident in that arena... I’ve always been more interested in what the other person is thinking and feeling. So I found it really fun to understand how to read a character and step into somebody else.”

Is she the kind of person who can pick up the energy in a room? “I am, yeah. I’m a bit like that. It can be great. And it can also be harmful because you can’t turn it off. As an actor it’s really helpful. You are able to capture an energy and stay in that feeling. People always say actors must be good at lying, but actually I think acting is completely truthful.”

I remind her of an Instagram post in which she said she was reading a book called Please Yourself by psychotherapist Emma Reed Turrell. The book describes different kinds of people-pleasers. Edgar-Jones identifies as “a pacifier”. The book says they “keep the peace at all costs, avoid conflict by burying their feelings and won’t challenge others’ behaviour. Pacifiers seek the acceptability of the middle road, never voicing a contentious opinion or unpopular preference.”

Where is she on the people-pleasing scale now?

“I think people-pleasing is maybe a very female experience,” she says. “I’m trying to learn how to be what is known as compassionately direct. It’s a way that you can be generous with your spirit and be kind and nice to work with but also ask for what you need. Learning that the word no is a full sentence is a really hard thing to do and to accept and to practice, but it’s important.”

Is she getting better at it? “Definitely. I think age helps for sure, and just having more experiences that you learn from.”

Speaking of experiences, does she have a long-term strategy for her career or is she taking it as it comes? “I want to continue to work with film-makers I admire... I like being part of somebody else’s vision and giving myself over to that experience. I hope I am lucky enough to continue doing that.” Directing is also an ambition. “I love seeing how actors approach different material. I’m fascinated by it all. By cameras, by film-making and I love music, so the soundtrack to a film is always interesting to me.”

Her love of music means she always makes playlists for her characters. “For Kya it was a lot of nature sounds obviously, but also a great piece of classical music with a weighty cello. And also Bat For Lashes, for some reason.”

“I nearly fell off my chair,” she says, on hearing Taylor Swift had composed a song for the Crawdad’s soundtrack. She’s been a fan of the singer for years. “I knew someone had written a song but I had no idea it was Taylor Swift. It could not be more perfect for the film.” Has she met her yet? “Potentially at the premiere, that would be amazing.” She has also exchanged “the odd email” with Sally Rooney about Normal People. “I should get them framed. Sally makes the most simple thing so profound. I’m obviously a huge admirer of hers.”

When I ask if she’s read any good books lately, she mentions No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. Rooney is a fan, and that’s what encouraged her to read it. “I saw a quote of Sally’s saying ‘I adore this book’ and it is a really great read, so witty.”

She’s looking forward to catching up with friends when she comes back to Ireland for the premiere of Where the Crawdads Sing. Most of her main friendships, she says, have been through work. “I feel very lucky. On every job I’ve managed to collect absolute gems of human beings.” After that she’ll start work on other projects she can’t talk about. “They haven’t been announced yet, but I can’t wait to start. I’m excited.”

Our time is up. I compliment her outfit and she tells me it was put together by a woman called Nikki “who is much more stylish than me”. She likes dressing up and appreciates the part of her job where she gets to wear beautiful clothes styled by experts at glamorous events such as the Met Gala. (For fashion fans: her shirt is St Roche, the jeans Maje, her shoes Giuliva, and not forgetting those Tiffany & Co accessories).

I slip in a few quick-fire questions before the PR person, who has been sitting with us in the room, whisks her off to the next interview. What’s the scariest animal in the world? “Spiders, definitely,” she says without hesitation. If you had to listen to one song for the rest of your life, what would it be? “Oh my gosh,” she ponders. “Maybe, Never Too Much by Luther Vandross.” Describe the rest of your life in a few words. “Full of great people, I hope.”

And then she’s gone. Daisy Edgar-Jones, a charming young woman with an award-winning talent for disappearing.

Where the Crawdads Sing is in cinemas from July 22nd