Emily Watson Is in Charge

The double Oscar nominee grew up in a cultlike organization. Acting became her way out of it.

- Jackson McHenry

When you get to my age and you’ve been acting this long, you are in full control of your powers,” Emily Watson, 57, tells me over lunch at a swanky London hotel. In person, Watson exudes intellectual intensity and modish English reticence, though there’s a certain mischievous energy of the kind that defined her early performances. Her most recent roles have placed her in positions of great authority: In the upcoming film Small Things Like These (Watson won a Best Supporting Performance prize for it at the Berlin International Film Festival), she plays the Mother Superior of an Irish convent, quietly but powerfully threatening Cillian Murphy lest he release information about its abuse of women. She’ll also star in HBO’s Dune: Prophecy, a prequel series spun off the Denis Villeneuve films, playing Valya Harkonnen, leader of the sect of witchy nuns eventually known as the Bene Gesserit, which plots the future through subterfuge and arranged marriage.

The characters resonate with Watson’s own life. Watson’s family was part of the School of Economic Science, a cultish religious organization founded in England and influenced by Hindu traditions that proposed to teach meditation and philosophy and operated private schools for its members’ children. Those schools were, according to former pupils, hotbeds of cruelty and child abuse—an independent investigation in 2005 found evidence of criminal assault at the boys’ school in the 1970s and ’80s—as well as highly traditionalist values.