According to its director, a passionate historical play about Emily Bront’s love life, who is not thought to have had any romantic affairs in her brief life, is guaranteed to irritate historians.
Frances O’Connor, well known for her roles in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and The Importance of Being Earnest with Colin Firth, is making her writing and directing debut with the film.
‘Emily,’ a reworked biography of the renowned shy novelist, depicts her principal figure as involved in a forbidden romance with an assistant priest – a genuine and allegedly gorgeous guy.
‘I’m sure some people will be pissed off about it,’ O’Connor told Total Film.
‘Historians will undoubtedly say, ‘Well, it didn’t happen,” say people like Bront.
Emma Mackey, 26, from Sex Education, plays the title heroine in the historical drama.
According to the director, ‘passionate’ Mackey, a Bront superfan herself, was ideal for the lead part. O’Connor went on to say that Mackey had previously shown an interest in playing the author, and likened the emerging star to Charlotte Bront.
‘She’s incredibly intelligent and a very passionate person, but she also has this furious intellect to her like Emily had, and she understands who she is in a really powerful manner.’
‘When you put it on film, it’s simply really captivating.’ And I think she’s so great in the film because she wanted to portray it in a manner that was really personal to her,’ she told French-British actress Mackey, who is expected to appear in the forthcoming Barbie film, due out in 2023. Mackey also suggested the guy who plays Bronte’s love interest.
Weightman is played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen, who recently acted in the horror film The Invisible Man and was a family friend and assistant curator to Patrick Bront.
The film imagines personal encounters that might have impacted Charlotte Bront’s impassioned masterwork.
O’Connor, who has spent most of her career in period plays, said she has been a fan of Bront’s works since she was 15 and was inspired by the author’s impassioned work Wuthering Heights.
‘She’s a mystery, we know so little about her – and I’m an introvert, and this character is an introvert,’ O’Connor said of Bront’s attraction.
Bronte, who died of consumption at the age of 30 in 1848, completed her seminal masterpiece barely a year before her death. ‘There’s a lot in there. ‘Through the book, you can get a sense of who she was,’ O’Connor told Metro.co.uk.
‘She was someone who battled with things that looked very current – she had social anxiety and fought with her sense of who she was, and her connection with her sisters seemed very genuine.’
‘Emily, how did you write Wuthering Heights?’ asks Mackey’s character at the beginning of the trailer.
‘Do not bring disgrace on this home, Emily,’ her father, Patrick, portrayed by Line of Duty’s Adrian Dunbar, cautions her.
Bront’s poetry entices Weightman, who tells her, ‘There is something unholy in your writing, I feel it when we’re together.’
Amelia Gething and Alexandra Dowling portray Anne and Charlotte Bront, and the video depicts their sheltered upbringing in Haworth, Yorkshire.
According to the trailer, the author is a “rebel, outcast, and genius.”
O’Connor expressed happiness that the picture represents her own acting career, although she stressed that her next project would be a departure from historical plays.
The Warner Brothers picture will have its world debut at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Emily will be released in UK theaters on October 14.