FACE IN FOCUS: EMMA D’ARCY

EMMA D’ARCY REVELS IN THE ART OF STEPPING INTO SOMEONE ELSE’S SHOES.

By Megan Hullander

From runway regalia to roles onscreen, Emma D’Arcy is a master of disguise. On the surface, the actor’s characters are altogether disparate: In becoming House of the Dragon’s Rhaenyra Targaryen, they wear the tragedies of a more-than-adept woman struggling to claim her power; as Tommy in their latest short The Talent, they are a twitchy production assistant on the set of a corny car commercial, as uncomfortable as he is eager to overstep. But there are parallels between them: most obviously, Emma notes, in their need to be known. It’s something that the actor reluctantly relates to. And something they’ve achieved, their face stamped onto the collective cultural consciousness—if not for their Game of Thrones off-shoot, then for their viral, off-balance cocktail recommendation. (Google searches for Negroni sbagliato increased by more than 500 percent in the month following their endorsement.) They don’t take the platform superficially, though, leveraging their HBO ascent to become a distinctive voice in queer discourse. These days, Emma relishes in uneventful expeditions that let them escape the celebrity of it all. “I like being in unfamiliar places,” they say. “Not necessarily miles away, but just a suburban street I haven’t seen before.” Today, though, they venture someplace more familiar.

MEGAN HULLANDER: What have you been up to this morning?

EMMA D'ARCY: I made a pilgrimage to get a pair of shoes fixed. I’m actually very passionate about cobblers, so for me it was a great pilgrimage.

MH: Do you find yourself frequently in need of a cobbler?

ED: My mom said that I was hard on shoes and I think it was a prophecy. Because it turns out that I am hard on shoes. I’m constantly having my shoes fixed. I find a pair of shoes secondhand. Fall madly in love.

See each other all the time. And then, inevitably, they start to break. The honeymoon period is over. I don’t have a backup. I operate on a one-pair-at-a-time basis. I’m in constant dialogue with repair.

MH: There’s a sort of fantasy with thrifted things, as if you get to adopt the personality of whoever owned them before you.

ED: Maybe the reason I love secondhand clothing is that, yes, to some extent, it wears you. With time, you wear it—but initially, it’s a foreign object, it’s a different smell, it’s worn in for someone else’s body. I guess I am an actor, so I like being someone else.

MH: The most extreme version of adopting a different character, I imagine, would be in fantasy. Do you think it’s easier to understand or be critical of ourselves in a fantastical landscape?

ED: My dad was a huge science fiction fan. I was lucky to be brought into that universe by him. You sort of go to another galaxy in order to flip the telescope around on our behavior. You put humans in the most extreme and most foreign environment possible, and actually, they behave in a way that’s very familiar. I suppose fantasy must do something similar. It speaks to some sort of feeling about where we’ve come from, or at least the systems or structures we inherited.

MH: Is there a part of you, with characters, even in fantastical worlds, that feels like you’re playing out a different version of yourself?

ED: I enjoy investigating what it feels like to live inside antiquated systems as a contemporary body. I suppose my excitement comes from attempting to go somewhere new and depart from myself.

I get quite excited by characters who aren’t obviously sympathetic. Most people are sympathetic if we spend any time with them. I enjoy when Rhaenyra challenges audiences. It’s a story of ‘Targaryen destiny,’ and so when you see Rhaenyra slighted by the system, the narrative structure states that you side with her. I’m always looking for ways to honestly complicate the loyalty of the audience.

MH: How do you do that in a shorter time frame—like with Tommy in The Talent? How do you make a character complicated in just 15 minutes?

ED: In order to make the story resonant, the character must somehow be sympathetic. Tommy’s got this perpetual misunderstanding, this sort of egoism. It’s all in the micro-detail. The setting is small, the context is small, the time period is small. And that felt like a lovely challenge: asking an audience to side with someone who’s not cool. We like an underdog, but we want them to have something about them. Tommy is a tragic case, but one who maybe allows us to be a bit more honest about our moments of deep embarrassment.

MH: Tommy felt like a really bodily performance. It’s easy to see where your experience in the theater would serve that. Are there ways you think your work onscreen serves you onstage?

ED: I felt really confident in the theater. But I haven’t been onstage in ages, so I’m nervous about it. I feel very strongly that I must nip that fear in the bud because I risk having to reassess my sense of self completely. I have been taught a lot by screenwork—not least, really basic stuff like, Maybe you don’t have to work so hard to show the audience what you’re feeling. Maybe you can trust that we are good at reading people.

I’m craving a character who requires a lot of work—in investigating the context that created them, their ideology, their way of interacting with the world. We live in a really polarized moment, and I can’t see a way of having a progressive conversation if we can’t be brave and investigate polar ideologies. I don’t know that I’ve had the chance to go somewhere that really challenges my ideas.