I Want to Play a Fish

Emma Laird recalls a moment — not all that long ago — when she was stood on the rooftop of her apartment in Los Angeles, looking out across a picture-postcard sunset skyline and smoking a cigarette.

“It was so cinematic,” she says. “And I was crying my eyes out.”

The Brit had been on the phone to her agent, who had informed her that, despite making it to the screen test stage for HBO’s “Gossip Girl” reboot — the closest to any role she’d got after months of grinding daily auditions — the part was going elsewhere.

“And I just thought, that’s it, I tried, my visa’s running out and I’m broke,” she says. “So I went back to London.”

Skip forward a little over half a decade and Laird is still in London. But she’s now one of the U.K.’s fastest rising young names, boasting an enviable and eclectic array of high-profile projects (“Mayor of Kingstown,” “The Brutalist,” “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple”) already under her belt and with many more (“Blood on Snow,” “War,” “Neuromancer”) incoming. At the Berlinale, she’s attending with the buzzy new series “Mint,” her first lead role.

But almost comically down-to-earth, the 27-year-old — part of a decreasing array of working-class British actors rising up call sheets — isn’t one to revel in her recent achievements.

“I’m constantly working from a place of self-deprecation,” she says between gulps of matcha latte in a west London café near her recently bought home. “It does feel like a nice trajectory, but I’m too insecure to feel like I’m amazing. But I do take pride — I know when shit’s good.”

And shit has been very good.

In stark contrast to the L.A. rooftop scene, Laird experienced something of a career epiphany in a semi-freezing field in Yorkshire. The moment occurred while shooting Nia DaCosta’s wild and gory franchise sequel “The Bone Temple” and a delightfully unhinged performance as Jimmima, the most sadistic member of the murderous, wig-wearing cult led by Jack O’Connell.

“I just looked around and was like, I am living the dream,” she says. “I was just looking at this derelict set of a zombie apocalypse and thinking ‘This is fucking amazing — this is I want to do!’”

Blood-splattered screen star was not on the cards when Laird first started out.

Spotted at a music festival by a model scout, at the age of 17 she packed her bags, quit her studies and moved from her hometown in Chesterfield in the north of England to London. “I was so focused on being successful,” she says. And she was, fronting numerous fashion campaigns (including for Vivienne Westwood, who she wore at “The Bone Temple” premiere) and magazine shoots.

But after six years of modelling she had become disillusioned with the industry, not helped by calls from her agency to “lose some weight.” Having spent so long hanging around enthusiastic, creative people, she was urged to give acting a go.

It was Taylor Sheridan’s bleak Michigan-set prison drama “Mayor of Kingstown” — in typical style booked just months after her tearful return from L.A. — that was Laird’s major breakout several years later. Her debut turn alongside Jeremy Renner as a seductive escort got industry tongues wagging. Variety named her a Brit to Watch in 2021. She was off.

Apple TV series “The Crowded Room” and Kenneth Branagh’s all-star Agatha Christie whodunnit “A Haunting in Venice” soon followed, and later, “The Brutalist,” playing the standoffish — and possibly antisemitic — wife of Adrien Brody’s cousin (and a role Laird says she only got because Brady Corbet accidentally trapped her finger in a door when filming “The Crowded Room”). Although she couldn’t enjoy its awards season success due to being “so back-to-back,” she claims that the “The Brutalist” was the “first thing I watched that I’ve been proud of.”

“The Bone Temple” was the second. But this film also helped ignite a craving for the wild and the weird, for daring roles where the prep could involve, for example, digging into the twisted childlike mind of someone who had been “raised in an apocalypse.”

In short, from here on Laird wants to be bold, bonkers and loud.

“That’s not to say to shout,” she asserts. “But subtlety is easier to do, because you can hide behind it. Whereas in making brave choices, you run the risk of making mistakes.”

For the actress, while prestige, awards and acclaim are all well and good, that’s not her focus at this point in her career.

“I get that you can give a beautiful performance like Jessie Buckley in ‘Hamnet,’ which was fucking amazing,” she says. “But what inspires me is watching people do mad stuff. So I want to make films about fairies or wizards or weird shit. I don’t want to do Shakespeare, I want to play a fish.”

Hollywood certainly serves up more literary than fishy roles, but Laird does have her eye on joining HBO’s “Harry Potter” series, potentially as one of the underwater Merpeople. (She claims to be such a fan of the original films that she regularly puts one on each night before she goes to sleep).

But before any potential future enrolment in Hogwarts (the Merpeople don’t actually show up until the fourth book, “The Goblet of Fire,” so there’s a few years to wait), Laird has another TV series incoming.

“Mint,” premiering in Berlin and from fellow rising Brit Charlotte Regan — who made a splash with her feature debut “Scrapper” — is a distinctly stylized and exquisitely shot drama in which she portrays the love-struck daughter of a crime family. This time, she’s not to the sidelines wearing blood-splattered tracksuits and fairy wings, but front and center of the action, and it’s a debut lead role she’s feeling quite anxious about.

“I’ve been doing all this work, but it’s been with these smaller, cool characters,” Laird notes. “And it feels like now people are starting to watch me in stuff, and that’s quite scary — I have the fear of what people will think when they watch me.”

With her “nice trajectory” only appearing to point upwards, Laird acknowledges that she’ll have to get over this fear, especially as she goes for noisier roles. Ironically, just a day after we meet, it’s announced that she’s cast, not in a film about Shakespeare, but as Daphne du Maurier in “The Housekeeper” alongside Helena Bonham Carter and Anthony Hopkins. However, she notes that her research into the famed author of “Rebecca” has revealed that she was “loud and rich” and aims to bring that presence to the set when filming kicks off later this month.

Laird is also very much aware that her rising in-demand, booked-and-busy status might very different had the call about “Gossip Girl” (mixed reviews, scrapped after two seasons) gone the other way on that cinematic evening on the rooftop in L.A.

“I think it’s a nice thing to remember — that maybe the thing you think you want is not the thing you need,” she says. “Who knows what would have happened, but it all worked out so well. And now it’s just a beautiful memory to look back on and think, how poetic!”

She laughs.

“But I do remember that that was probably the best cigarette I’ve ever smoked in my life.”