Sex Education star Emma Mackey has revealed a surprising challenge she faced when filming her Emily Brontë biopic, Emily.
Speaking to Digital Spy, the actress said she faced difficulty when trying to read the author’s seminal work, Wuthering Heights.
“I studied English, so I'd read it before," Mackey explained. "I actually found it weirdly harder to read with my kind of academic, English brain because I was trying to analyse it too much, and actually it doesn't work.
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“I feel like I was trying too hard to pin it down, like, 'What does she mean by this', and interpret it. And actually, once you let it happen to you in a way, you kind of experience the book in that way, I think that's what I feel about the film as well. You just have to live it and just go with it. And I think it's really exciting.”
Appearing alongside director Frances O’Connor, who described Brontë’s novel as “an emotional and visceral experience”, Mackey opened up about the filming process of the biopic.
“I enjoyed it, reading all the books and the biographies that Frances sent over,” she said. “It was nice to have that solid reference point.
“But our ‘Bible’ is the script of the film. That’s what I relied on the whole way through, but it’s exciting because there’s room for interpretation and imagination. That’s the whole beauty of the script, it’s very free.”
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The film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, stars Alexandra Dowling and Amelia Gething as other literary sisters Charlotte and Anne. Fionn Whitehead, star of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, plays brother Branwell, with Adrian Dunbar as their father.
Mackey, who appeared in Death on the Nile, recently spoke of a “hard” scene which ended up on the cutting room floor for Emily: “[This scene] was so charged, there were so many scenes that were very charged.
“There were many hard scenes but it was always fun to do because you have something real to get your teeth stuck into.”
Emily is released in cinemas on October 14.
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