Daisy Edgar-Jones

The steamy lockdown smash turned the actor into a star overnight. Just one problem: she couldn't leave the house. Can she belatedly adjust to fame?

“I learned in a hurry that I had to part with my idea of Normal People the moment it landed. For a lot of people, that was the only escape we had.” She lost herself in Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, she remembers, and books including Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing, one of the great literary successes of the year. It meant another beloved literary character to try to peel off the page and do justice to on screen – or, as Edgar-Jones puts it: “Pressure! You’re coming to scenes that people have already formed a deep relationship with, and you’ve got a couple of hours in front of a camera to get it right for them.” Edgar-Jones was one of the last actors to be cast in Normal People, and an unusual choice in that she was not based in Ireland. After a series of solo auditions, she secured the gig after a “chemistry read” with Mescal, already cast as the other lead, Connell. Normal People became a defining show of an era, in part because of its cool, even-handed script by Rooney and Alice Birch, in part because of directors Hettie Macdonald and Lenny Abrahamson’s unhurried pacing and technical dazzle. Edgar-Jones blinks and says she was like the duck in that oft-used analogy: “Above the water you have to appear absolutely chilled. To this day she is convinced that this angry new haircut helped her land the part as Marianne, the high-minded nonconformist of Normal People. “I’ve played a lot of characters with accents, and I feel like I’ve sort of kept bits of them in my subconscious. If she wants to, she can sprinkle her conversation with enough variations of the word mate (“Mate! … Maaaaaate … Mate?”) to pass muster as a Londoner, but at the same time she says “wee” not “little”, “gosh” more often than “God”, “ach!” instead of “oh!”. Actually, the main result of her reading that day, she says, was to make her communicate more richly with her friends from home. She still swaps texts with the friends she made on set, including Mescal. “But I haven’t seen anyone I made it with for two years now.” And that little bit of time I was home, I was jet-lagged. We were supposed to be meeting for a coffee in the park’s cafe, only it’s out of season and the doors are firmly shut.