Daisy Edgar-Jones is singing Paul Mescal’s praises once more.
The “Where the Crawdads Sing” and “On Swift Horses” actress told ELLE that working with Mescal is “like playing tennis with your best friend.” The duo co-starred in “Normal People” together, which now marks its five-year anniversary.
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“I have worked with basically all of the internet’s boyfriends,” Edgar-Jones said, citing Mescal, her “Twisters” co-star Glen Powell, and “Fresh” actor Sebastian Stan (of course, she’s also opposite Jacob Elordi in “On Swift Horses,” too). “And I’m lucky that every actor I’ve worked with has been incredibly supportive of me being the lead. 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.”
Edgar-Jones continued, “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.”
Edgar-Jones also reflected on her rise to fame with 2020 series “Normal People.” To some extent, not much has changed for her since then.
“I remember when ‘Normal People’ first came out and I was being interviewed loads, I talked so much about experiencing impostor syndrome,” she said. “I really thought it would go away, and it hasn’t. But I’m working on it. I don’t want that fear of not being good enough to ruin my life.”
The actress added of the show, “It isn’t that I’m bored of talking about it, because I am so proud of it. I want to find something that connects like that again. I still can’t comprehend how widely it reached. Five years on, I’m older now, and I’m keen to talk about other things, too.”
Edgar-Jones explained her approach to selecting roles, specifically characters with “agency.”
“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 said. “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.”
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