When Emma Corrin arrives at Hampstead Heath on a cloudy spring morning, the sun makes its first appearance in days, as if it has finally decided to make its grand entrance just for them. This is where the 28-year-old actor spends most mornings, with a coffee in hand and their dog, Spencer (no relation to Diana), tagging along. “He’s actually on the Heath, we might run into him,” they say, looking out across the field towards where Spencer runs wild at doggy daycare.
With its winding routes and rolling hills, the heath is the kind of serene haven you can get lost in. Which, for Corrin, is not always a good thing. “My therapist is like, ‘You've got too much time to think,’” they say, laughing. They’ve had a lot to mull over. Ever since the actor was anointed as a teenage Princess Diana in The Crown in 2020, they have, purposefully, kept themselves busy. At first there came more period dramas about isolated women in similarly suffocating marriages (My Policeman, Lady Chatterley’s Lover), followed by a striking pivot, typified by Corrin’s sleuthing hacker in the underseen miniseries A Murder at the End of the World.
This summer promises to propel Corrin into a whole other stratosphere with the biggest role of their career so far in Deadpool & Wolverine. The third entry of Ryan Reynolds’ meta-wisecracking superhero franchise arrives at an unenviable time, in which the Marvel Cinematic Universe is no longer a money-printing machine and the summer box office is begging for an adrenaline shot. Ironically, the film feels like one of the safest bets of the year. Perhaps it can bring more than just Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine back from the dead.
In Deadpool, Corrin sheds the image of the strait-laced women who have come to define their early roles, stepping into unfamiliar shoes as Cassandra Nova. The name itself will trigger a shiver for those in the know: Cassandra, who can be seen in the Deadpool trailer manipulating Wolverine’s limbs like a marionette, is Professor Charles Xavier’s evil twin and possesses Xavier-level psychic powers. But when we meet in late spring, the full trailer has yet to be released, and the identity of their character is still being kept secret. Corrin is fully cognisant of what happens when an MCU actor accidentally spills closely-guarded secrets. As we walk towards one of Corrin’s favourite coffee shops, they acknowledge that they really can’t confirm the role, as much as I attempt to convince them to reveal it anyway. The information is out there if you look hard enough, right? “Sorry, I wouldn't care as much, except that it's Marvel,” they apologise.
Exiting the Heath, a passerby locks eyes with Corrin, lighting up in recognition before moving on. Corrin offers a polite smile in return. It feels like they’re slowly settling into a new way of living, where they greet people they don’t know, and accept that being recognised at any moment is something normal; that, before long, walks on Hampstead Heath might not be so easy.
For now, however, Corrin is on pause. Save for a three-week stint filming pick-ups on Deadpool & Wolverine after last summer’s SAG-AFTRA strike forced production to go on hiatus, they haven’t had consistent work in almost a year. The break has been, in part, a blessing: they’ve been able to reunite with friends and family, read more, catch up on John Cassavetes and Wong Kar-wai movies. All this newfound borrowed time has provided the space to recalibrate and re-energise – and overthink. “But since I've had this break, it's unbalanced,” Corrin counters. “And it feels a bit, like, this is shit. I'm not even doing the thing I love.”
For a while, it felt like Corrin had found that balance. Their most rewarding roles have been the ones that have aligned closest with themself. A Murder at the End of the World’s Darby was one of them, with her peach-coloured hair, masculine wardrobe and a rich interior life that matches Corrin’s overthinking tendencies. “What I really enjoyed about her was that she's very upfront about the fact that she doesn't have the answers, which I think is quite rare and what [creators] Brit [Marling] and Zal [Batmanglij] definitely wanted to do with marking a difference in female detectives,” they explain. The show was one of the overlooked casualties of the strike. “It's a shame because everyone who's seen it really likes it,” they add. “And also that was a really tough job.” They spent six months filming in New York before moving to Iceland – the setting for the titular death at a millionaire’s compound – where a Covid lockdown stretched out a two-week shoot to a month.
Just as validating was Orlando, the West End adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s epic about a shape-shifting time-traveller, which Corrin performed to universal acclaim in 2022. “I really miss it,” Corrin confesses. “I didn't realise quite how affirming it was to do that every day, when it's something so close to you. Something that feels incredibly personal and celebratory. The atmosphere in that theatre at the end of the show was amazing. I felt like it was really making a difference to tell that story in that way, in such a healing space of immediate connection. It’s a real celebration of fluidity.”
It wasn’t always this way. Immediately following The Crown, Corrin prepared themself for nothing but period roles indistinguishable from Diana, and had their worst fears confirmed when the offers came in. “We're in an industry which loves to pigeonhole,” they say, nursing their cup of coffee. “They take something at face value, and when you apply that to something so much more fundamental and deeper and more nuanced as gender…” they take a beat before sighing in resignation. “It’s really hard.”
They tell me about attending an all-girls’ boarding school as a child, the last place you want to be as a young person feeling out of place in the binary. There’s a period of time when you’re young, when you’re honestly and wholly yourself. For Corrin, that person was a budding zoologist, who shopped exclusively in the boys’ section of Gap and carried around a pair of binoculars everywhere. And then the real world infiltrates. You’re made aware of your differences and everything that was natural to you suddenly begins to feel ill-fitting. “I went to the dance and someone thought I was a boy and asked me to dance, and it became a big joke in my class,” Corrin recalls. “Since then I started conforming. I grew out my hair and rolled up my skirt.”
When Corrin came out as non-binary in 2021, the typically private process of self-reckoning was split wide open for the whole world to see, or as Corrin says, a “headfuck.” In that instant feedback loop, the industry’s desire to label and categorise went back into informing the very identity they were still attempting to figure out. “You go into everything very fresh-faced and with a lot of genuineness,” they say. “And then you get knocked down a ton and then you come out and you're verbal about your identity, and then people fucking stamp that out. Make fucking stupid clickbait headlines that make you feel like shit and use your identity against you as a weapon.” Now, Corrin says, they’re more guarded – careful to nurture the person that others tried to erase. “It’s nice to think that kid is now actually being looked after.”
It’s a perilous time to star in a Marvel movie. With superhero fatigue well and truly setting in, a studio used to guaranteed hits now faces a weakened batting average. But true to the merc’s outsider spirit, Deadpool & Wolverine is all but guaranteed to defy the odds, with box office predictions pointing towards a staggering $200 million opening. Still, Corrin isn’t naive to the reality of the MCU’s fading glory. “There's a lot of pressure on it, but I think that it’s the right one at the right time,” they say. “Because it's Deadpool, and Deadpool has always broken the mould, right? That’s why Ryan [Reynolds] is a literal genius.” In the face of the genre’s growing lethargy, the film was shot on built sets as opposed to the green screen eyesores that have dominated in recent years. It was the “biggest, best playground in the world,” according to Corrin. “When the genre has been incredibly safe, and at the moment, it's on the rocks, people come in and blow it out of the water again.”
Playing a villain was a thrill in itself. For their research, they did a deep dive into cinema’s classic antagonists, pulling inspiration from Christoph Waltz’s Nazi officer in Inglourious Basterds and “one of the best villains of all time,” Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka. “There’s something extravagant in Gene Wilder’s performance,” Corrin says. “And it's a similar energy that Christoph Waltz has in Inglourious Basterds, because he's wearing a uniform so he can sit there and drink a glass of milk and pretend he's a fucking fairy godmother.”
Corrin lives for that kind of challenge. For Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’ remake of the 1922 horror classic and original vampire movie, what should’ve been an unassuming take of Corrin walking down a corridor was made complicated when they were tasked with becoming the sole lighting operator. Initially, they were cautious. I was like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? You can't land this responsibility on me! I can't, I'm not ready,’” they recall. With the cord of their lamp running down their dressing gown, Corrin remembers the choreographed dance necessary to position their arm in such a way to light the frame perfectly. “Can I put this on my CV now?” they joke. “Do I get a lighting credit?”
There was a lot to get accustomed to on Nosferatu. Famed for his intensive research, Eggers provided Corrin with a “bible” on their character’s entire life. “Literally even down to the song she was dancing to when she met her husband,” they say, still in disbelief. Scenes were rehearsed like a play, and the notoriously perfectionist filmmaker had every minute movement planned out, as if he was puppeteering actors in his macabre dollhouse. Much has been made of Eggers’ fidelity to period-accurate dialogue, no matter how alienating it might be for audiences, but Corrin had no trouble getting a grasp of it. “It is funny, dealing with a subject like horror and having the confinement of language that doesn't let you go, like, what the fuck is happening?”
Sitting on the outside patio of the coffee spot, we’re forced to take off our coats and scarves as the temperature rises. It’s a shame that Corrin can’t bask in this rare moment of warmth for much longer. They’re booking an Uber straight to the next meeting, and it feels like the break is definitively over. The week after our meeting, they’ll fly to the other side of the world to shoot Peaches, a reimagining of the surrealist classic Daisies by up-and-coming director Jenny Suen. It’s another one of the radical shifts Corrin has been craving: the film transposes the original’s Czech setting to Hong Kong, and follows two best friends who wreak havoc in the name of giving a proud middle finger to the patriarchy.
They’d love to star in a “campy horror”, but beyond that, Corrin’s aspirations are nebulous, driven by instinct. “Honestly at the moment, the weirder the better,” they say. “That’s why I’m excited to do Peaches.” They’ve also had a script, co-written with their friend Avigail Tlalim, in development since 2019. (The pair also plan to co-direct.) Corrin is currently in the midst of trying to secure funds — ”If anyone wants to finance my first feature that'd be wonderful!” — and it’s a glacial process that’s been an education in itself. “There's a nice kind of reassurance in that,” they concede. “It will take as long as it takes, and it'll be the right thing when it happens.” I wonder if they think this project, the details of which they’re choosing to keep secret, is risky.
“Yes and no,” they reply. “I don't actually think it is, but I think people who are financing it will be like, ‘I don’t want to make this.’” That seems to be the increasing reality of the industry: people aren’t opening their wallets for the art, but for the safest investment. “It's that funny thing about this job,” Corrin adds. “The people who are signing the cheques are just so removed from the things that we’re actually writing about.”
Every barrier, personal or professional, is seemingly predicated on that demand to conform. “However your identity speaks to you, what speaks to you more is the pressure to fit in,” Corrin reflects. “It took me a while for that to fall away and for me to start having the true independence of figuring out how I wanted to present.” Now they’re moving at their own pace. They choose the roles that challenge and validate them. And if those roles aren’t out there, they’ll just make them happen.
Deadpool & Wolverine is in cinemas on 26 July.
See Emma Corrin at GQ Heroes in Oxfordshire, from 3-5 July, in association with BMW UK. For more information and tickets, visit GQHeroes.com.
Styling by Sam Ranger
Hair by Daniel Martin
Make-up by Gina Kane at Caren using ShiSeido
Manicure by Cherrie Snow at Snow Creatives using Hermès
