Educating Emma

She exploded onto the scene with Sex Education, and is breaking the biopic mould as the middle Brontë sister in EMILY, but Emma Mackey is still hungry for new experiences. Here, she tells Total Film about life lessons, Barbie, and what she's learned from working with Margot Robbie.

- MATT MAYTUM PORTRAIT RANKIN

Overnight stardom' is, like all clichés, egregiously overused. But it's undeniably apt for Emma Mackey, coinciding with all eight episodes of Sex Education Season 1 dropping on Netflix on 11 January 2019. The show was an enormous hit, and Mackey - as Maeve Wiley, the feisty, street-smart high-schooler who helps Otis (Asa Butterfield) establish a sex-therapy clinic for their fellow students in need instantly became a star.

A standout among a cast destined to dominate screens for years, Mackey had attitude, acting chops, and screen presence to spare. This was, somewhat unbelievably, her first professional acting role (she'd dabbled with drama while studying English Language and Literature at the University of Leeds).

She's since starred in a further two seasons, and when Total Film catches up with her via Zoom in August, she's just about to start shooting the fourth.

While that show has been keeping her busy, her film career is also off to an enviable start, and her highest-profile lead role to date arrives in cinemas shortly. Emily sees Mackey star as the middle Brontë sister and Wuthering Heights author, who published that industry-shaking classic aged just 29.

A keen reader who'd studied in the north of England, Mackey would seem like an ideal fit for this particular literary icon. "I had an interest in literature and female literary characters - Emily Brontë and the Brontës generally were figureheads of that,' explains Mackey, dressed casually in a plain white vest and a delicate white necklace. "So I was interested. But I wasn't a die-hard Brontë-head. I'd just read the books, and had read [Charlotte Brontë's] Jane Eyre, and had read Wuthering Heights and all of these.