As a child, Emilia Jones loved role playing games and pretending to be other people, but it wasn’t until she became a teenager that she realised this was what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. She was filming the psychological Western *Brimstone* along with Guy Pearce and Dakota Fanning, and was sitting on a bench during a night shoot. “I definitely had a turning point,” she recalls, speaking over Zoom from a hotel room. “I was sitting there waiting for the rain to stop and I had a moment where I was like, I’m absolutely shattered, but in the best way. My body is sore, but in the best way. I’m in a place I would never go to – we were filming in the middle of nowhere in Germany – and I would never have come to this beautiful part of the world. I just felt like acting was enriching my life in a way I couldn’t explain. It was filling a void inside me I didn’t know I had.” At that moment, she knew this was what she needed to do.

Jones’s acting career is the stuff of dreams: her first job, aged eight, was as the daughter in the original One Day film, alongside Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess (for some time afterwards, Jones kept a framed picture of Jim on her bedside table, which she said goodnight to before going to sleep – “My parents were like, I wonder how long this will last”). As a child, she starred as one of Thomas Cromwell’s daughters in Wolf Hall, in Channel 4’s Utopia and in an episode of Doctor Who; on the big screen, she had a small role in a Pirates of the Caribbean film and in the Ben Wheatley adaptation of JG Ballard’s High-Rise. Things just got better from there: she was cast in Netflix series Locke & Key, in the film adaptation of Kristen Roupenian’s viral short story Cat Person, and was the lead in the 2022 Oscar best picture winner Coda (“It was such an amazing feeling – that night we made history”).

Now 23, she stars alongside Mark Ruffalo and Ozark’s Tom Pelphrey in Task, a gritty, dramatic HBO miniseries about an FBI agent tasked with investigating an outlaw motorcycle gang. Jones plays Maeve, a headstrong and determined young woman who’s been put in charge of her uncle’s children following a string of family tragedies. “Maeve has been dealt a tough card in life,” says Jones. “When you meet her in the show for the first time, she is very stuck, and she’s slowly losing her sense of identity. She’s so young, but she’s shouldering a lot of adult responsibility.” For the role, Jones had to nail the hyper-specific local accent – Delco, or Delaware County – which entailed watching showrunner Brad Inglesby’s previous series, The Mare of Easttown, on repeat to avoid accidentally picking up other intonations.

In many ways, Maeve is the total opposite of Jones – over Zoom, she is neat and pristine and unfailingly polite – but she disappears into the role. “It was fun to play someone completely different: she has loads of tattoos and a nose ring and a mullet.” Jones remembers going into a coffee shop and seeing a barista with a similar haircut. “I was like, ‘That’s Maeve!’ So I decided to razor my hair.” (For anyone thinking of doing the same, a word of warning: “They do take absolutely forever to grow out – but it’s a cool hairstyle. Sometimes I miss it… sometimes I don’t.”) Maeve also embodies “Delco energy”, which, Jones explains, means “they just say it as it is. There’s no filter. And I think that’s really great, because I’m the most British person ever, and we’re scared of our own shadow.”

“I think we did something really special. I’m sure people were not satisfied with parts of Coda – but it is just one film. And I hope that, because Coda did what it did, that it’s opening the door for other people to tell their stories about different communities, maybe not through an able-bodied character.”

Mark Ruffalo, she says, was “a joy to be around – like sunshine”. She tells a story of how, at the end of filming, he arranged for everyone to go see Olivia Rodrigo but he was called away at the last minute, so “we all went to the show, and he was sending us selfies looking so upset on set”. In order to build rapport with the kids, Jones took them bowling and spent weekends playing basketball with them; since filming wrapped, they have remained close. “For a lot of my life,” she says, “I’ve been the kid on set, so I wanted to make sure they felt special and were having a great time.”

Growing up in Barnes, southwest London, her childhood was “full of fun and love and excitement”. Her mother, former trapeze artist Claire Fossett, comes from a distinguished circus family, while her father is singer Aled Jones (of The Snowman’s “Walking in the Air” fame); her parents’ backgrounds meant her upbringing was “maybe not that conventional, but it made me feel like a job in the arts wasn’t off limits to me”. Although she never went to drama school or received any formal acting training, she learned on the job, carefully observing everyone around her. “I’m a people watcher,” she says. “I love that everyone has such a different technique. So I’ve been learning on every project I’ve done.”

No one can accuse her of not committing herself fully to each role. For Coda, in which she portrayed a child of deaf adults, she was given the option of just learning her lines in American Sign Language, but it felt important for her to master the language fully, so that she could communicate with her co-stars – Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur and Daniel Durant – without an interpreter. (She is also planning on learning British Sign Language, which is different.) Although generally well received, Coda was criticised by some for centering the experience of the able-bodied character. “The film is representing the coda community, which hasn’t been represented really on screen much or at all,” Jones says, choosing her words carefully. “I think we did something really special. I’m sure people were not satisfied with parts of Coda – but it is just one film. And I hope that, because Coda did what it did, that it’s opening the door for other people to tell their stories about different communities, maybe not through an able-bodied character.” She points out that the film’s director, Sian Heder, is working on a film about disability rights activist Judith Heumann – “also a really important film to be told”.

Next, Jones will star in Edgar Wright’s The Running Man opposite Glenn Powell, and Tony, the A24 biopic of Anthony Bourdain, in which she plays his first wife Nancy Putkoski (Bourdain is portrayed by The Holdovers’ Dominic Sessa; in a full circle moment, the film also stars Leo Woodall, who played Dexter in the recent Netflix adaptation of One Day). On the set of Tony, she added a new skill to her repertoire: “I worked in the Ritz kitchen, and I learned how to be a Michelin starred chef. For my job, I’ve learned sign language, how to fish, how to sing, how to do a Delco accent. I’m learning skills that are setting me up for life.” Whenever she’s tired at the end of a 17-hour day, she reminds herself of how lucky she is to do a job she loves. “I get to travel and push myself, emotionally and physically, in ways I would never do. It’s my favourite thing.”

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