NormalPeople star Daisy Edgar-Jones is back with a new horror rom-com, 'Fresh' — and an extremely modest outlook on her sudden fame.
fame — to the hilarious horror rom-com. He plays Steve, new boyfriend to her jaded, fed-up-with-dating-apps Noa, in a budding relationship that goes off the rails when it’s revealed he is actually an enterprising cannibal who sells bits and pieces of his paramours to men with very particular tastes.“She was the reason I ended up doing this [film],” Stan says’s hectic junket a few days later.
and just loved it. She was so complex and layered and real and vulnerable and sort-of bold. It was the most raw, authentic performance that I had seen in a while.”’s deeply interior Marianne — a move that was intentional but not without its challenges. The most arduous scenes, Edgar-Jones recalls, were the gore-fest final moments in which Steve’s stock of women — each missing various limbs — finally escapes his clutches.
When Stan looks back on that sequence, he remembers how frigid it was in Canada where they were shooting, and all the fake gore, sure, but also Edgar-Jones’ warmth and good humor. “She was in this pink dress and had blood all over her mouth, and she was still cracking jokes, trying to make me laugh,” he says, laughing. “Then five minutes later she’d have to go and get to like a level-20 panic. It was a flawless switch.
Edgar-Jones has only been acting professionally for about seven years now, appearing mostly in British television shows and stage plays before making her way stateside for programs like Fox’s. She grew up tangential to showbiz, though; her father works for a British TV station and her mother was previously a film editor. “I have so much respect for the editor because, really, they’re piecing together your performance,” she says.
That separation between self and character — and the ability to thrive in the in-between — stayed with her from then on. “Perhaps what I like about acting is that I feel able to do things that I am uncomfortable with when I’m in character,” she says. Take, which centers around the fraught relationship between Marianne and Connell from high school through college, and features copious sex scenes, some passionate, some dark, all very vulnerable.