Daisy Edgar-Jones Knows She’s Worked With Your Internet Boyfriends (2025)

In a dance studio somewhere in north London, Daisy Edgar-Jones is standing on her tiptoes. It’s been about five years—and a sudden rise to international fame—since she felt like her heels last touched the ground. In an effort to return to her roots, the actor decided to take up ballet lessons again. She hasn’t worn these shoes since she was seven.

“My mum still has my grade one certificate,” Edgar-Jones says. Returning to ballet now, after her mind wandered from it as a child, feels like she’s recentering herself. Though it’s not lost on her that she is, despite being just 26, a little old to be studying for her grade two qualification. “My lovely ballet teacher told me that I could do a group exam or a solo one, but that the group exam would be me and a bunch of eight-year-olds!” she says, laughing. “They’d wipe the floor with me.”

Edgar-Jones and I have agreed to meet at a Mediterranean café in Crouch End, the leafy London neighborhood that was rumored to have hosted Taylor Swift during her time here, and that borders Muswell Hill, where Edgar-Jones grew up. She bounds through the door in a wool hat, a tan distressed-leather jacket, a white T-shirt, black pants, and boots, spotting me in the corner.

The ballet dancing—an act of grounding—follows a half decade that changed her life in ways she could never have predicted. Back in April of 2020, Edgar-Jones became what felt like one of the most-watched women in the world. The TV limited series she starred in, an adaptation of Sally Rooney’s searingly sad romance Normal People, coddled a bruised population through the early stages of the pandemic. Her performance as Marianne earned Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations; alongside her co-star, Paul Mescal, she became an internet obsession.

In the years since, Edgar-Jones has relished the opportunity to try different things. Some days, she tells me, she’s into blockbusters. Recently she’s been watching big, big movies, like Braveheart and Speed. Last summer, she starred in one, the sweeping disaster film Twisters. The film helped her “appreciate these epic-scaled movies that stay with people for years,” she says. With Twisters and the hit adaptation of Where the Crawdads Sing, she already shows the allure and credentials of a movie star.

But on other days, like today, all she’d like to do is dance. The role that initially lured her back to ballet this past winter was Maggie, the lonely and frantic protagonist of Tennessee Williams’s potboiler Southern drama, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The play, helmed by the celebrated theater director Rebecca Frecknall in London’s West End, centers on a married couple—Edgar-Jones’s Maggie and Brick, played by Barbie’s Kingsley Ben-Adir—and how their fragmented relationship holds up to the severe expectations of Brick’s rich family. Through ballet, Edgar-Jones hoped to take hold of some of Maggie’s nimble prickliness—until she broke a toe. Only recently was she able to return to the practice.

She embodied the role regardless: Every night, a sold-out crowd watched Edgar-Jones burst onto the stage in a silver dress and deliver a monologue, near uninterrupted, to a disinterested Brick for close to an hour of the first act. It was a blazing reintroduction to the form she’d first fallen in love with as a teenager, and strangely full circle: It was the first play she’d appeared in since Albion, also at the Almeida Theatre, less than a month before London locked down in 2020. “Five years on, and my life is so different,” Edgar-Jones says. “I am so different.” She says it’s the most she’s ever grown on a job.

The show might be done, but her body hasn’t quite clocked that. She’s shedding her layers in the hot café, ordering Turkish eggs as we talk. “Last night, I was watching Gilmore Girls, and at around 7:30 my heart was going at 111 beats per minute,” she says.

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If she’s been consumed by the big-budget fare that shaped her 2024, then her 2025 looks set to take Edgar-Jones back to more character-driven material. April sees the release of On Swift Horses, a queer independent drama set in 1950s California. Edgar-Jones plays Muriel, a housewife who’s settled in San Diego with her husband Lee, played by British actor Will Poulter, after he returns from the Korean War. Jacob Elordi plays Lee’s mercurial younger brother Julius, who turns down an offer to settle in town with his brother and heads to Las Vegas, where he embarks on an affair with a man. All the while, Muriel’s domestic setting becomes stifling and strange to her; she longs for the life Julius lives. And so Muriel responds to her urges, drawing close to her neighbor Sandra (Sasha Calle).

The film shot for two months on the dusty, beautiful landscapes on the outskirts of Los Angeles at the start of 2023. To bring the cast together, and to lean into one of the film’s central themes, its director Daniel Minahan brought in an expert on poker and blackjack to teach Edgar-Jones and her castmates how to play. She pored over a reading list of books from the period that Minahan gave her. She had an early belief in the project, having signed on in early 2022, waiting for the moment to start shooting. “I thought it was a really beautiful, lyrical script, and I found it really interesting to [think of] how a filmmaker would take it on,” she says. (She also ended up loving the costumes: “When Will and Jacob and Sasha came in their outfits, I was like, ‘This is very hot.’ Everyone looks so hot. I love the high-waisted ’50s.”) It reminded her of Normal People in a way: a young ensemble cast who all bonded quickly, and its themes of “interpersonal dynamics, self-discovery, growing up, and learning who you are.”

In high school, Edgar-Jones was well-behaved and studious. She wasn’t the brooding, painfully artistic type, she admits: “I was lighthearted and cheerful…and a bit weird.” She discovered theater early on. At 15, she spent much of her spare time as a member of London’s National Youth Theatre, where she found like-minded friends and, a year later, auditioned for a dark adaptation of The Little Mermaid by Sofia Coppola. Coppola eventually left the project, and Edgar-Jones has little memory of the audition, beyond lying on a sofa (“because I didn’t have legs, I had a fish tail”) as she read her lines. That she didn’t get the role doesn’t matter, because she made the right impression: The film’s casting director pointed her to an agent, who put Edgar-Jones on the books right away. Soon after, she was cast as a series regular on the British sitcom Cold Feet, which put her plans to go to university on pause, and a TV retelling of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. And then, after being cast in 2019, Normal People came into her life.

It hasn’t really left her since. Her co-star Mescal remains one of Edgar-Jones’s real-life best friends. Together they weathered the strange half-in, half-out pandemic fame, being stalked by paparazzi every time they left the house. It happens to this day—though, she jokes, “never when I’m dressed really nicely and I’ve done my makeup well. I promise you, it’s only when I wear Birkenstocks and socks or pop out for some milk. I see photos of myself online and go, ‘Damn it.’”

While doing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she was applauded in the style pages for wearing Birkenstocks in winter. “That was a pioneering fashion statement I’d made, because I got papped in it, and I was devastated,” she says, laughing. In reality, it was November and she was freezing—she just couldn’t wear shoes because of her broken toe.

Today, Normal People continues to dominate much of Edgar-Jones’s narrative. I wonder if there is a part of her that is weary of talking about it, and she laughs a little. “It isn’t that I’m bored of talking about it, because I am so proud of it,” she says. “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’s list of co-stars reads like a roll call of the most fawned-over stars of the moment: In addition to Elordi and Mescal, there is Harris Dickinson (Where the Crawdads Sing), Andrew Garfield (Under the Banner of Heaven), Sebastian Stan (the horror film Fresh), and Glen Powell (Twisters). “Just Timothée Chalamet and Austin Butler left!” she jokes.

But what’s interesting is that in almost all of her projects since Normal People, she is the lead; these men (aside from Garfield) have taken second or third billing. This perhaps speaks to a positive trend in Hollywood: Last year was the first time for gender parity at the box office, with a little more than half of high-grossing films being led by women. Twisters and Crawdads have a combined global box office gross of more than half a billion dollars.

“I have worked with basically all of the internet’s boyfriends,” she says. “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. 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.”

Dickinson, her co-star in Where the Crawdads Sing, says Edgar-Jones makes it easy to collaborate. “She’s one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. She has immense patience and sensitivity,” he says. “I think that makes her a brilliant artist, too, because it means she’s fully tuned in.”

Her characters spill into the corners of themselves, full pictures of what it means to be a woman. Her Marianne was scathing and complicated; both at the behest of a boy and too good for him. In Crawdads, she played a marsh girl at the center of a court case, for whom the typical structures of society hold no interest. “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 says. “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.”

She prepares for her characters with a dogged work ethic—she began learning her lines for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof months before even stepping into the rehearsal room—which might stem from an admitted fear of failure. “I remember when Normal People first came out and I was being interviewed loads, I talked so much about experiencing impostor syndrome,” she says. “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.” She says she reads reviews of her work “all the time.” It was Frecknall who encouraged her to stop reading what people, critics specifically, think of her. “That’s just been a big learning curve for me,” she says. “I didn’t realize I have a fear of getting things wrong, or failing, or embarrassing myself, you know? All those things that come with life, but also with the job I do, because it’s so public. I experienced a lucky and big trajectory in my early 20s, but it meant that my period of learning has been in front of people. I’m growing and getting better but also sometimes getting it wrong, and I find that hard at times.”

She has learned quickly, but she’s also had to unlearn much of what her brain tells her to think about how Daisy Edgar-Jones, the movie star, is seen. She knows she can’t please everybody, that some of her projects haven’t been showered with the same praise that Normal People was. “Where the Crawdads Sing didn’t get great reviews, but it’s been the thing that most people come up to say they loved,” she says. “For some people, it’s their favorite film. How amazing is that? And I had the best time, and I think it’s a great film. Art is so subjective, and you can’t control how people respond. You can only do something with goodwill and to learn something from it yourself, I suppose. And then how people respond is because of their context and what they need.”

The past few months, the time spent grounding herself—with Frecknall, with Maggie, in the ballet rehearsal room—seems to have changed her perspective somewhat. There are things that matter more to her right now than the judgments of others. “Of course, I want to make things that connect, and I want to make things that are critically acclaimed, but
I also want to be brave and fearlessly approach my work,” she says. “You can’t do that if you’re too worried about whether something’s good or bad. You can only connect with whether you find something truthful, and if it speaks to you, then give it your all. I want to stop being concerned about anything other than what’s in front of me.”

Hair by Cim Mahony for Dyson Beauty; makeup by Florrie White at The Wall Group; manicure by Jenni Draper at Premier Hair and Make-Up; set design by Josh Stovell at Lalaland Artists; production by Stuart Phillips at Fuse Productions.

This story appears in the April 2025 issue of ELLE.

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