Emma Mackey on playing Emily Brontë, her upcoming role in Barbie, and filming Sex Education season 4

Six weeks sounds like a very rapid filming process – although it’s starting to make sense how you’ve been able to take on so many different acting projects recently! How did Emily come to be made in such a compressed time frame?

Because it’s an independent film with a small budget – and that means reduced filming times. We just had to make do. I’m glad we did because it just added such a wonderful pace to the film, and yet it still remained very delicate – it feels like we really took our time in some moments, which I’m really pleasantly surprised to see [on screen]. The original cut was four hours long, so there was a lot in there that’s not in the final cut for the film. It’s so brave of Frances to tackle this subject that is so completely unknown to a lot of other people. It was so evocative and rich, even just reading it and then doing obviously was a whole different sport.

You studied English Literature & Language at Leeds University. Were you already a fan of Emily Bronte’s work?

Yes. I’d read Wuthering Heights years ago. I think I actually found [this role] harder to do because of studying English Literature, though – I was analysing it like it was a book on the curriculum. And, strangely, it didn’t feel like this part was for analysing. It was so evocative, powerful and chaotic in so many ways – it just needed to be experienced without putting too many rules or formatting on to it.

In the film, there are suggestions that Frances O’Connor’s fictionalised Emily Bronte suffering with her mental health – how did you go about portraying this?

It wasn’t prescriptive at all. Obviously, it’s all speculation – there isn’t a lot of information out there about [Emily Bronte], it’s more retellings from her older sister Charlotte. So obviously, it’s based on a subjective point of view. It was tricky to get a sense of who Emily was, but you can gather pieces of the puzzle – and while there’s no prescribing of any mental health conditions, the way the film is written means that there was scope to portray things like social awkwardness, anxiety, depression, all these things. But it wasn’t prescribed. And that’s for the best, I think. It didn’t need to be. That [mental health] dimension hit me seeing the film for the first time on screen. I just immediately felt heartbroken. Like, God, imagine having all of those thoughts and having to house all of those feelings and repress them and repress them and repress them. Not seeing yourself reflected anywhere – how daunting and terrifying that could be. Now, it’s so much more open, well, in our Western society anyway. People are aware of mental health, and there are systems in place to help people. But I can imagine how overwhelming that must have been back then, especially with the whole religious element and how massively overpowering that was for them, moving under the same roof. It’s very charged.

The Brontes flew the flag for female authors, even though they originally were forced to be published under male pen names because they weren’t even accepted as female novelists in the mid-18th century. In what way did you portray their feminist legacy?

When embarking on the project, I didn’t think of Emily as writing or existing in a way that was like, Oh, I’m gonna be a feminist writer. I mean, you’re right, she is a literal icon and a representation of so many others, but she was also just a human being who had no voice but to write – to put her thoughts to paper. I think she just had to write and couldn’t really do anything else. It was a survival thing for her: a fight or flight. It’s so extreme being up there in that landscape: being in that village, and being surrounded by all that vastness and then being stuck in this house with your dad and your siblings. Being scared of going outside. As she says in the film, I just took my pen and put it on paper. There’s something quite wonderfully simple about that. Just writing your thoughts down and being able to produce a novel like Wuthering Heights, and then dying…and that’s your only legacy. There’s something poetic about her story. It’s a fantastic source of inspiration for so many people. And Emily didn’t get a good review until 50 years after she died. So she never really found solace in anything. So I hope that the film is a celebration of her in a way that she didn’t really get to in her lifetime. It’s a thank you, really, to her and to a female writer who laid the groundwork for us to be able to work and have careers.