Entertainment
Frances O’Connor unveils her ‘non-biopic’ directorial debut about Emily Brontë, starring Sex Education’s Emma Mackey: ‘It doesn’t follow any of the period drama rules’-Tori Brazier-Entertainment – Metro
O’Connor is a familiar face to period drama fans, thanks to her work on Mansfield Park, Mr Selfridge and The Importance of Being Earnest.
The actress film is part of this year’s festival circuit after a 10-year journey (Picture: Michael Wharley/Popora Films/Warner Bros/Getty/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)
Actress Frances O’Connor has enjoyed a successful film and TV career spanning over 25 years, lighting up our screens in projects including The Missing, The Importance of Being Earnest with Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon and her big international breakthrough role as Fanny Price in the 1999 adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel.
Now she’s turning her hand to writing and directing as her long-gestating passion project Emily heads to the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival next month.
With her fresh new imagining of the life of Emily Brontë – ‘it’s not a biopic’ – featuring fast-rising star Emma Mackey in the lead role, the British-Australian creative is realising an ambition she’s held for over a decade to helm her own project.
O’Connor has also been an Emily Brontë fan for years.
Speaking exclusively to Metro.co.uk ahead of the releasee of Emily’s trailer, she recalled: ‘I read Wuthering Heights when I was about 15 and just fell in love with that book. And when I was shooting a film in London, a long time ago, I went to Yorkshire for the first time and went to Haworth [the Brontë family’s home village] and it was so evocative – I arrived there on a train and there was mist and it was just picture perfect.’
Ten years ago she then got serious about her ambition to become a director – ‘and someone had said, “The best thing you can do is write something and say you’d like to direct it.”’
O’Connor is a successful actress and long-time fan of Emily Brontë (Picture: Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic)
One of her first major roles was in an Austen period drama, leading 1999’s adaptation of Mansfield Park as Fanny Price (Picture: BBC/Miramax)
‘So it kind of came together that I thought about writing a story about Emily, but I didn’t quite know what it would be. I started doing the research and then the story began to form in my mind about a young woman trying to find her voice, even though who she is isn’t really acceptable, and her struggle through that to become who she is and write this novel,’ she explained.
What you shouldn’t expect from Emily is an historical account of her all-too-short life.
‘I’ve taken inspiration from certain elements from Wuthering Heights, and also the biographies that I read, and put those pieces together to create a narrative, which is not a biopic. It’s more like its own thing.’
Discussing the appeal of Brontë, O’Connor added: ‘She’s a mystery, we know so little about her – and I’m an introvert and this character is an introvert! She died when she was 30 and yet she wrote this gargantuan piece of work and there’s so much in it. You can kind of feel who she was through the novel.
‘She was somebody who suffered from things that just seemed very modern – she had social anxiety and she struggled with her sense of who she was, and her relationship with her sisters feels very real.’
O’Connor is full of praise for her rising star leading lady, Emma Mackey (Picture: Michael Wharley/Popora Films/Warner Bros)
Those sisters, of course, are Anne and Charlotte Brontë, played by Amelia Gething and Alexandra Dowling. The trailer shows the sheltered and at times claustrophobic life they led with their brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead), who struggled with his own addictions, and their father Patrick (Line of Duty’s Adrian Dunbar).
Having lost their mother Maria at a young age, it makes for quite a modern family set-up with the Brontë girls, who missed out on socialising due to their mother’s absence, the ones that would go on to immortalise the family name with the likes of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
‘I think that’s why we love them, because we feel like they were real people that we knew that sat around having cups of tea and toast while they were writing like we do, and I feel like it’s the personal nature of those books and the lack of formality that you have in a Jane Austen. You just feel the reality of those lives,’ O’Connor shared on the family’s appeal.
Emma Mackey, late of Netflix’s Sex Education, a key character in Sir Kenneth Branagh’s latest Poirot adaptation Death on the Nile and soon to be in Barbie, was ‘phenomenal’ in the role of literary giant Emily, according to her director.
Mackey rose to prominence in Sex Education, pictured here with co-star Asa Butterfield, but has since snagged a role in the upcoming Margot Robbie Barbie movie too (Picture: Sam Taylor/Netflix)
The actress’s French skills came in handy too for Emily (Picture: Michael Wharley/Popora Films/Warner Bros)
‘From the moment she auditioned, I really couldn’t think of anyone else who would do such a great [job in the] role. And there were quite a few names that we met for the part but I just felt there was something that she had to offer that role that felt really personal. She also just really loves Emily Brontë as a character and a person and what she represents to her, so it felt like a really great meeting of a character and an actor.’
She plays opposite Oliver Jackson-Cohen (The Invisible Man) as William Weightman, a family friend and assistant curate to Patrick Brontë, and ended up the ideal choice for the role as far as both director and lead actress were concerned.
‘There was somebody else that was supposed to play Weightman and then because of the pandemic, his dates shifted, and so we had to go back out and meet people – I had been thinking of Oliver and then Emma called me and said, “What about Oliver Jackson-Cohen?” And I said, “This is really weird!” because I had worked with him, so he’s a friend.
O’Connor said scenes in which natural speakers Mackey an Jackson-Cohen converse in French in particular ‘just kind of went through the roof’.
Oliver Jackson-Cohen plays William Weightman, a real-life friend of the Brontës (Picture: Getty)
The trailer teases a romance (Picture: Popora Films/Warner Bros)
‘I feel like we got very lucky with casting that that way. It felt like he was meant to play that part afterwards.’
She also praised Dowling as ‘a great discovery for me’, and another performer who replaced the original actor as Charlotte.
‘It’s probably the hardest role in the whole film to calibrate, and she just did a beautiful job.’
The production was also able to shoot in genuine locations – although mostly in Dent in order to film ‘virginal landscapes’ and ‘get that same kind of feel that they [the Brontës] would have experienced’.
‘But we did shoot on the same streets of Haworth that the Brontës would have walked, which was great. We did a scene in the apothecary where they had gone and Branwell probably got his drugs from.
O’Connor with Colin Firth in 2002’s The Importance of Being Earnest, one of a number of successful period dramas in which she has appeared (Picture: Miramax/Ealing Studios)
‘The house that we shoot in the film actually was inspiration for Emily to write Wuthering Heights as well, which was kind of cool. We didn’t know that until after we had secured that location.’
O’Connor is someone who is naturally linked to period dramas in the public eye thanks to Mansfield Park, The Importance of Being Earnest, Madame Bovary and Mr Selfridge. Is directing a period piece ever where she saw herself going at the beginning of her career?
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‘No, I mean it was a dream of mine, I really didn’t think it would happen and it’s been such a long journey to get to the point where I could make it, and I feel so blessed that I’ve been able to do it. It’s just such an enjoyable process.
‘I guess in some ways for me, yes, it’s set in a period of time – but for me it’s more about the people within it and trying to make them as real as possible and that’s kind of what we were going for, this sense of handheld camera, just making it feel like you’re right there with Emily in the moment, so that it doesn’t follow any of the period drama rules. And you get a sense of who Emily was as a as a person.
‘But it is nice that my first film also reflects on what my career has been, in a way; that’s kind of lovely. But I’m going to do something modern next!’
Emily will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It releases in UK cinemas on October 14.
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