Daisy Edgar-Jones said in an interview with Elle Magazine that she is quite fortunate her A-list male co-stars have never taken issue with her being the lead star over them. She first broke out onto the scene opposite Paul Mescal in “Normal People” before co-starring with Sebastian Stan (“Fresh”), Harris Dickinson (“Where the Crawdads Sing”), Glen Powell (“Twisters”), Andrew Garfield (“Under the Banner of Heaven”) and Jacob Elordi (“On Swift Horses”). Edgar-Jones joked that she’s basically “worked with all of the internet’s boyfriends,” so much so that she’s just got “Timothée Chalamet and Austin Butler left.”
“I’m lucky that every actor I’ve worked with has been incredibly supportive of me being the lead,” she added on a more serious note. “Glen, Sebastian, Paul, all of them. I think that’s why they’re so successful and so loved and so good: that they are so generous, and they really serve the story and are not serving themselves. Glen was always like, ‘What’s Kate’s journey in this? Let’s find it.’ And same with Sebastian; he was so completely invested in Noa’s journey. Paul’s like playing tennis with your best friend. I’m nervous for the point that it comes to working with someone who might not be so chill with it. Because there’s so much ego that can exist in this industry.”
Dickinson credited Edgar-Jones with making the “Crawdads” set such a breeze, telling Elle magazine: “She’s one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. She has immense patience and sensitivity. I think that makes her a brilliant artist, too, because it means she’s fully tuned in.”
“It’s great that more and more stories are being made with women front and center. It’s also an interesting thing, being a woman in your 20s, wanting to find characters who are not always ingenues,” Edgar-Jones added. “You want to find characters with agency. I want every character I play to be complicated and deep and have layers to them, because that’s what it is to be human. I feel lucky that a lot of the characters I’ve played have had that. They aren’t defined by their actions or their experiences, or by the men in their life. Like with Kate in ‘Twisters,’ I know there was a big uproar that there wasn’t a kiss at the end. But she went on a journey in that film that was bigger than a romantic journey.”
Edgar-Jones’ latest film, “On Swift Horses,” opens in theaters April 25 from Sony Pictures Classics. Head over to Elle’s website to read her latest cover story in its entirety.
