The way Emma Laird tells it, she booked her role in the majestic, Oscar-tipped new film The Brutalist because director Brady Corbet trapped her hand in a cupboard door. They were shooting an episode of Apple TV+’s The Crowded Room in mid-2021 when it happened. “He felt so bad he bought me an original poster for Paris, Texas from its Cannes premiere, which I have framed in my bedroom upstairs,” Laird says, grinning on a video call from her flat in Hampstead, North London. “But he still felt awful – so our producer, Alexandra Milchan, said he should put me in his next film.”
Laird is selling herself short by suggesting Corbet only cast her as an apology. As the icy, elegant Audrey Harris, who proves an early enemy of Adrien Brody’s architect Lázló Toth, she exudes a biting cruelty. When the pair meet, Lázló is a Jewish immigrant who’s just arrived in America, having survived internment in a concentration camp. Audrey, the American wife of Lázló’s already-assimilated cousin Attila, barely masks her resentment towards him. Despite only appearing in a handful of scenes at the beginning of the three-and-a-half-hour historical epic, Laird makes a remarkable impression.
In the three short years since she transitioned from modelling to acting – via a stint at the New York Film Academy – Laird has been creating a name for herself as a strong supporting actor, first as the smooth-talking escort Iris in Taylor Sheridan’s crime thriller series Mayor of Kingstown opposite Jeremy Renner, then as the quick-witted refugee Desdemona in Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot movie A Haunting In Venice.
“My drama teacher told me I was going to fail”
Pursuing acting as a career never occurred to Laird, who grew up in Chesterfield, a Derbyshire town with about 70,000 residents that is best known for coal mining and its crooked church spire. “I didn’t grow up thinking I would be an actress or a pop star, because [in my mind] they were all in America and that seemed so far away,” she recalls. “It never seemed achievable to me.” When she was 16, Laird was scouted by the agency Models 1 at Leeds Festival and soon moved to London to pursue a career in fashion. She quickly found that it wasn’t for her. “I hated modelling, so it really felt like I was starting again [when I began] acting,” she explains. But even that wasn’t in her life plan: “I was actually more into music as a kid, and grew up writing terrible songs and terrible lyrics. I always loved drama at school, but I never got picked for lead roles. My drama teacher told me I was going to fail.” It turns out her teacher was wrong.
As a seven year old, Laird remembers being “scarred for life” when her neighbour showed her Night of the Living Dead. Today, it’s transformed into a love for the horror genre. Last month, she was pinching herself as she wrapped a long, back-to-back production on the reboot of Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later and 28 Years Later Part II: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DaCosta. “I walked out onto the set and saw all the derelict cars, and thought ‘…I’m in a zombie movie. I am living in a dream right now’,” she says, laughing.
When we talk, Laird is about to start costume fittings for her next project, Jim O’Hanlon’s period farce Fackham Hall. As for what comes after? She wants to work with Corbet and his creative and real-life partner Mona Fastvold again. Laird also namechecks Robert Eggers, Jordan Peele and Kristoffer Borgli as filmmakers on her hit list. “Basically, anything dark and twisted!” she suggests. “Directors that do any of those – call me please!”
Credits
Writer: Hannah Strong
Photography: Jackson Bowley