Daisy Edgar-Jones on ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ and the ‘Strangeness’ of Stardom

Agencies 

New York, Aug 8 : One of the breakout stars of the pandemic, Daisy Edgar-Jones, was finally out and about at Locarno Film Festival, where she picked up the Leopard Club Award and introduced her latest film “Where the Crawdads Sing,” based on a novel by Delia Owens.

“The whole idea of being a ‘breakout star’ is a strange thing to comprehend anyway. The strangeness of that, happening in tandem with the strangeness of the pandemic, meant that those things will be forever mixed up together for me,” she tells Variety, recalling “Normal People’s” triumphant unveiling during the lockdown.

“In reality, nothing in my life was changing. I was still in my bedroom on Zoom. This year, I have been all the more grateful for being able to promote the projects I worked on and actually be with the people I made them with.”

Her new film, set in the South and starting all the way back in the 1950s, gave Edgar-Jones a chance to portray a woman who harbors a secret.

“It’s an interesting thing to play. Not playing it is the goal, really. You want to lead the audience to various different places so that the suspense continues throughout the story,” she says.

Her character, Kya, isn’t a clean-cut housewife: She hunts for food, lives alone, and isn’t defined by the men in her life, notes Edgar-Jones. Until she is charged with murder, already deemed guilty in the eyes of a community that has been rejecting her all her life.

“This idea of her as this ‘Marsh Girl is one that’s completely fabricated by the people in town. We wanted to highlight how you can misunderstand somebody, paint a picture of them [in your mind] and find it hard to differentiate between that version and the actual person.”

But Kya is nobody’s victim and years of solitude and abandonment, or even romantic disappointments, can’t bring her down.