I want to play a fish

Emma Laird recalls a moment — not so long ago — when she stood on the roof of her Los Angeles apartment, looking out over a postcard skyline at sunset, smoking a cigarette.

“It was so cinematic,” she says. “And I cried my eyes out.”

The Brit had been on the phone with her agent, who informed her that despite making it to the screen test stage for the reboot of HBO’s “Gossip Girl” – the closest role to any she’d landed after months of daily auditions – the role would be going elsewhere.

“And I thought, that’s it, I tried, my visa is about to expire and I’m broke,” she says. “So I went back to London.”

Jump forward a little over half a decade and Laird is still in London. But she’s now one of Britain’s fastest-rising young names, with an enviable and eclectic range of high-profile projects (‘Mayor of Kingstown’, ‘The Brutalist’, ’28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’) already under her belt, and with many more (‘Blood on Snow’, ‘War’, ‘Neuromancer’) on the way. She will be present at the Berlinale with the vibrant new series ‘Mint’, her first leading role.

But almost comically matter-of-fact, the 27-year-old – who is part of an increasingly small number of working-class British actors – is not one to revel in her recent achievements.

“I constantly work from a sense of self-deprecation,” she says between sips of matcha latte in a cafe in west London, near her recently purchased home. “It feels like a beautiful journey, but I am too insecure to feel that I am great. But I am proud: I know when it is right.”

And it went very well.

In stark contrast to the LA rooftop scene, Laird experienced something of a career epiphany in a half-freezing field in Yorkshire. The moment took place during the filming of Nia DaCosta’s wild and bloody franchise sequel ‘The Bone Temple’ and a wonderfully unhinged performance as Jimmima, the most sadistic member of the murderous, wig-wearing cult led by Jack O’Connell.

“I just looked around and thought, I’m living the dream,” she says. “I just looked at this abandoned set of a zombie apocalypse and thought, ‘This is fucking amazing – this is what I want to do!’”

Blood-splattered fencer wasn’t there when Laird first started.

Spotted at a music festival by a modeling scout, she packed her bags at the age of 17, quit her studies and moved from her hometown of Chesterfield in the north of England to London. “I was so focused on success,” she says. And she was, fronting countless fashion campaigns (including for Vivienne Westwood, which she wore to the premiere of “The Bone Temple”) and magazine photo shoots.

But after six years of modeling she had become disillusioned with the industry, not helped by calls from her agency to ‘lose some weight’. After hanging around enthusiastic, creative people for so long, she was encouraged to give acting a try.

It was Taylor Sheridan’s bleak prison drama “Mayor of Kingstown,” set in Michigan – booked in typical style just months after her tearful return from LA – that was Laird’s biggest break several years later. Her debut alongside Jeremy Renner as a seductive escort set the industry’s tongues wagging. Variety called her a Brit to watch in 2021. She was off.

Apple TV series “The Crowded Room” and Kenneth Branagh’s all-star Agatha Christie whodunnit “A Haunting in Venice” soon followed, and later “The Brutalist,” in which she played the aloof (and possibly anti-Semitic) wife of Adrien Brody’s cousin (and a role Laird says she only got because Brady Corbet accidentally caught her finger in a door while filming “The Crowded Room”). Although she couldn’t enjoy the awards season success because she was “so back-to-back,” she claims that “The Brutalist” was the “first thing I watched that I was proud of.”

“The Bone Temple” was the second. But this film also helped fuel a desire for the wild and the strange, for daring roles where the preparation might, for example, involve delving into the twisted childish mind of someone who “grew up in an apocalypse.”

In short, from now on Laird wants to be bold, crazy and loud.

“That doesn’t mean you have to shout,” she claims. “But subtlety is easier because you can hide behind it. Whereas when you make courageous choices you run the risk of making mistakes.”

While prestige, awards and praise are all well and good for the actress, that is not her focus at this point in her career.

“I understand that you can give a beautiful performance like Jessie Buckley in ‘Hamnet,’ which was fucking amazing,” she says. “But what inspires me is watching people do crazy things. So I want to make films about fairies or wizards or weird things. I don’t want to do Shakespeare, I want to play a fish.”

Hollywood certainly serves up more literary than fishy roles, but Laird does have her sights set on joining HBO’s “Harry Potter” series, possibly as one of the underwater Merpeople. (She claims to be such a fan of the original films that she regularly puts one on every night before she goes to sleep).

But before any future Hogwarts enrollment (the Merpeople don’t appear until the fourth book, “Goblet of Fire,” so we’ll have to wait a few years), Laird has another TV series on the way.

Premiering in Berlin, ‘Mint’ from rising Brit Charlotte Regan – who made waves with her feature debut ‘Scrapper’ – is a strikingly stylized and beautifully shot drama in which she portrays the lovelorn daughter of a crime family. This time she’s not standing on the sidelines in blood-splattered tracksuits and fairy wings, but she’s right in the middle of the action, and it’s a debut leading role that she’s feeling quite apprehensive about.

“I did all this work, but with these smaller, cool characters,” Laird notes. “And it feels like people are starting to watch me now, and that’s kind of scary — I’m afraid of what people will think when they look at me.”

Now that her “beautiful trajectory” only seems to be pointing upwards, Laird acknowledges that she will have to get over this fear, especially as she goes for louder roles. Ironically, just a day after we meet, it is announced that she has been cast not in a film about Shakespeare, but as Daphne du Maurier in ‘The Housekeeper’ opposite Helena Bonham Carter and Anthony Hopkins. However, she notes that her research into the famed “Rebecca” author revealed that she was “loud and rich” and that she wants to bring that presence to the set when filming starts later this month.

Laird is also acutely aware that her increasingly popular, booked and busy status could be very different if the call about “Gossip Girl” (mixed reviews, canceled after two seasons) had gone the other way on that LA rooftop movie night.

“I think it’s good to remember that what you think you want may not be what you need,” she says. “Who knows what would have happened, but it all worked out so well. And now it’s just a beautiful memory to look back on and think: how poetic!”

She laughs.

“But I do remember that it was probably the best cigarette I ever smoked in my life.”