Emilia Jones Is Everything Everywhere All at Once
Emilia Jones credits her first professional acting job to beginner’s luck. She was 8 at the time, living in South West London with her singer father and circus performer mother, when she caught the attention of casting director Lucy Bevan at a local improvisational games class. The chance meeting led to a role in One Day with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess (no biggie!) and, shortly after, a part in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. What followed for the young actress was a steady mix of notable TV projects and celebrated indie fare, including the 2022 Best Picture winner CODA. The thing that has always been a through line is Jones’s captivating screen presence. If you ask us, luck had nothing to do with it.
Jones has no less than four projects coming out this fall: a tension-filled HBO crime drama, an indie romance featuring a complex love story, a tender father-daughter coming-of-age story, and a dystopian action thriller. Each is vastly different from the last, putting her extensive range as an actor on full display. Jones’s project-picking ethos is nothing if not thoughtful. “I owe everything to CODA,” the 23-year-old says over Zoom, referring to the breakout role that landed her a BAFTA nomination and helped open doors for the actress. Since then, Jones has been afforded the luxury of being picky about the roles she chooses to do, allowing her to really sit with scripts and find characters that are polar opposites from what she’s done in the past. “I’m such an open actor. I don’t have a specific lane that I want to stick in. I really love doing everything and anything and working with different filmmakers.” Jones says.
Speaking of, when the opportunity came up to work with Brad Ingelsby—the brain behind the Emmy-winning, Kate Winslet–led series Mare of Easttown—Jones jumped at the opportunity. “I was a huge fan of Brad’s and a huge Mare of Easttown fan. Every time my family and I are looking for something to watch, we’re like, ‘We just need another Mare of Easttown,‘” she says.
Ingelsby’s latest HBO miniseries Task certainly scratches that itch. A violent tale of vengeance, the seven-episode drama follows FBI agent Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo), who leads a task force to investigate drug-house robberies in a suburban Delaware County neighborhood of Philadelphia. The suspect? Unassuming working-class family man Robbie Prendergrast (a truly fantastic Tom Pelphrey), who is trying to provide a better life for his family. Caught in the cross fire of Robbie’s misdoings is his 21-year-old niece Maeve (played with emotional intensity by Jones), who is also co-parenting his two young kids. It’s a gritty cat-and-mouse pursuit that questions who we should be rooting for at every turn.
Maeve couldn’t be farther from Jones in real life, which was part of the initial appeal. “She’s got this razored mullet and tattoos and loads of piercings and big earrings and rings on every finger, and she’s this strong, working-class Delco chick, and I’m so… British,” Jones says, chuckling at the thought. Jones wants to learn from each of her characters and feel as if they have enriched her life in some way, and she saw that right away in Maeve.
Jones admits she’s never read a script faster in her life. She couldn’t put it down and loved Maeve, but there was the tall order of mastering the Delco accent in front of her. “If you push a sound too much, suddenly you’re from Texas,” she says of the very specific Philadelphian accent. The actress spent weeks working with dialect coach Suzanne Selby over Zoom before flying out to Philly two weeks before shooting and immersing herself in the culture. After the first episode aired, her Delco friends texted her to say she really sounded like she was from the area. “I was like, ‘Okay, greatest compliment ever,'” Jones says.
Up next, Jones has the Andrew Durham–directed and Sofia Coppola–produced film Fairyland releasing in theaters on October 10. Based on Alysia Abbott’s acclaimed memoir—Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father—the coming-of-age story chronicles a tender father-daughter relationship set against the vibrant San Francisco culture in the ’70s and ’80s amid the AIDS crisis. The film was shot over three years ago, and Jones looks back on the project fondly, calling it “a beautiful story and special piece of writing.” A big fan of the ’80s, the actress recalls living her best life among all of the sets and costumes, minus the perm she got for the shoot. “I always kind of jump into playing these characters, and then it’s just a never-ending battle of trying to fix my hair after filming,” she laughs. “It’s like I go all in, and then I have to deal with it when we wrap.”
Jones is fresh off a whirlwind press run at the Toronto International Film Festival when we meet following her Who What Wear shoot in early September. It was at the Canadian fest that she debuted the indie romance Charlie Harper, which she calls a passion project. The film by first-time directors Mac Eldridge and Tom Dean that also stars Nick Robinson went through its fair share of trials and tribulations getting off the ground, stalled first by the writer and actor strikes and again by conflicting schedules.
Described as a complex love story, it follows two young adults navigating their early 20s as they discover themselves both individually and as a couple. For Jones, it was a real scenario of life imitating art.
“When the script first came to me, I was in a relationship, and I saw a lot of similarities between my current relationship and Charlie and Harper’s relationship, so I wholeheartedly related to the script,” she tells me. “[Then] it just got pushed and pushed and pushed, and in that time frame of it being pushed, I went through a breakup exactly like Charlie and Harper, so I related to the film and to the project even more than I did at the beginning. … When I was filming it, it was really cathartic, and I really needed to do a film like that and to explore all of those emotions.”
A few days after our call, it was announced that Charlie Harper was acquired out of Toronto by Row K for U.S. distribution.
But Jones’s busy fall doesn’t stop there. This November, the actress will be back in theaters with the highly anticipated Glen Powell action film The Running Man about a dystopian competition game show in which its contestants are pursued by hunters paid to kill them. Jones describes her character in the film as “a posh, privileged realtor from Maine, and I wear Chanel and Gucci and have a diamond watch.” She sounds like a far cry from Task‘s Maeve, Fairyland‘s Alycia, and Charlie Harper‘s Harper, which is precisely the point. “They’re just so different, and I think that’s what’s fun,” she says. “It’s just playing characters that are different from yourself and becoming someone else and telling these really cool stories.”
Moral of the story: Don’t try to put Jones in a box. She’ll break out of it every time.
Catch Jones’s scene-stealing performance in the HBO limited series Task, now streaming.
Photographer: Bryan Carr
Stylist: Lauren Eggertsen
Hairstylist: Holly Mills
Makeup Artist: Kate Lee using Chanel Beauty
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