The realm of theatre is made manifest through a number of taut, synchronous dances—that between director and actor, text and performance, the spectator and the showrunners. Any singular misstep on behalf of any of the involved parties can catalyze a change so significant that the meaning morphs entirely: this is the terror of theatre, perhaps, and the beauty of it too.

Daisy Edgar-Jones, British actor known for her smoldering on-screen roles in Normal People, Where the Crawdads Sing, Fresh, and Under the Banner of Heaven, has had plenty of experience in meaning-making through subtlety. Edgar-Jones is lauded for her ability to inhabit the female psychosphere, whether it be through introspective Marianne from the aforementioned Rooney adaptation, or through Brenda Lafferty in Under the Banner of Heaven, roles for which she has received Golden Globe nominations. This spring, she’ll appear alongside Jacob Elordi in American queer epic film On Swift Horses. 

Over the winter, however, Daisy Edgar-Jones spent some time off-screen and on stage at the Almeida Theatre in London, where she appeared for the second time at the theater (after performing in Albion in 2020) in multi-Olivier Award-winning director Rebecca Frecknall’s rendition of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Edgar-Jones played Maggie, Tennessee Williams’ relentless, fiery protagonist. Where Edgar-Jones’ on-screen characters simmer, Maggie is explosive: Edgar-Jones brought an unshakable energy to the stage, opening with a 55-minute long monologue, closing with a scene wracked so weighty it was difficult to look at the stage.

In the hands of Frecknall (who is no stranger to Tennessee Williams, having directed A Streetcar Named Desire, and Summer and Smoke), and the force of nature that is Daisy Edgar-Jones, the modernized production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof finds new syncopation in its decades-old rhythms.

In the days following Daisy Edgar-Jones’ final bow in Frecknall’s production, the pair have a chance to sit down and speak about these rhythms, the stories that bind us all, and the mediums in which these stories are told.

How was the closing night for you all?
Edgar-Jones: I can’t quite believe it. When I came off stage, I saw Frecks [Rebecca] in the green room afterwards. It’s a really weird feeling, I think I didn’t expect to feel so emotional. I came off stage and I sort of burst into tears, but I think it was a mixture of like, “Oh, that’s over,” but also, adrenaline kind of leaving all your body in one fell swoop. 

It was the most amazing experience. So, saying goodbye to it, it’s a weird thing when you’re in such a bubble and then it suddenly pops, it’s a kind of odd feeling.

Frecknall: I said to Daisy, “You won’t feel it on Sunday because you never do the show anyway. But Monday night, your body might be finding it weird that you’re not on stage.” The day after press night I usually am quite down because I’m like, “Oh, well, no one needs me anymore.” 

Daisy, given Tennessee Williams’ layered portrayal of female characters, what was stepping into the role of Maggie like? What was your first reaction when you got the part?
Edgar-Jones: It was mad, because I didn’t know Frecks was doing it, and I got a call on my birthday from my agent. “Do you want to do Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Almeida?” I sort of screamed and said, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. Can I?” Frecks and I had done a workshop a couple of years before, and I’d auditioned for her for something. I’d seen everything she’d done, and the Almeida is my absolute favorite theatre.

I couldn’t think of a more incredible opportunity to play Maggie with Frecks at the Almeida. Me and all the cast were all saying, “It’s amazing,” but also you’re deeply spoiled and it’s going to be hard to live up to it; to have another experience like this one again, because it’s been so special. I mean, I’ve watched a few interviews of people who’ve played Maggie. There have been some amazing Maggies in the past—Kathleen Turner, Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller…she’s a really tricky character. I saw an interview with Kathleen Turner where she said it was amazing reading it and going, “Wow, I get to speak for 50 minutes.” But then also you go, “Oh my God, I have to speak for 50 minutes.” 

Rebecca, do you prefer to give more of a detailed direction or did you want to leave room for interpretation for Daisy for this particular role?
Frecknall: I don’t have a fixed sense of who the character is. When I’m casting, I’m not trying to find someone who’s going to fit into something that I’ve already decided and deliver something that I’ve got in my head. I’m sort of going, “Oh, I’d love to see that person interact with this role.” So that’s how I felt about Daisy and Maggie, I was like, “Oh I’d love to see Daisy’s version of this.”
‍
Then, the process is great because you’re in collaboration and you’re in a conversation together to go: “Well who is she, what does she want, what are her motivations, and how does she interact with these other people in her life?” It’s like a game to find out the answers to all those things and to play in the space together.
My job, at its best, is just to watch brilliant people make brilliant choices and kind of help steer a bit, but ultimately I’m interested in watching it unfurl. I discovered what the production is with the actors through the process, which was fun.

Would you say there were specific ways that this play impacted your relationship personally? Your personal relationships but also your relationships to acting and directing?
Edgar-Jones: What I found weird, actually, was there were lots of things in the play that had massively obvious personal resonance to me in my life that I hadn’t really noticed until we started rehearsing it. I think because it’s such a human play, and all the characters have got such specific tracks through the piece that there’s lots of different things that you could bump into at any one moment. 

You mentioned that you found it difficult to wind down. How did you both, I guess, decompress afterward, or recoup creatively in a way?
Edgar-Jones: I mean, I watched Gilmore Girls a lot. Crap TV, what about you, Frecks?
‍
Frecknall: Ha! For me, actually the real wind-down moments are when we’re doing previews, just in the run-up to opening the show where we’re working on the play in the day and showing it in the evening and noting it at night and then coming back to do that. Those days you do end up in this weird topsy-turvy world because you might not get home until midnight, and then I can’t go straight to bed because I’m wired. So yeah, a lot of fairly brainless documentary TV I would say for me. Daisy, do you feel like you’re having to readjust your whole body clock as well?

‍

Edgar-Jones: Definitely. It was funny, I got an Oura ring for Christmas, and it’s been the worst possible time, because it’s literally like, “You’re deeply unwell.” Every single day.

Frecknall: Really traumatic experience.

‍

Edgar-Jones: It kept saying, “Try taking it easy today and wind down earlier before bed.” I’m like, “I’m trying. I can’t!” But I do feel so inspired now at the minute though, which is such a nice feeling because I never really had an experience doing a play this long and I’m playing a part this big and I remember Frecks saying it will continue to grow and change and you will keep discovering.
‍
I remember Pearl and Claire, who I share my dressing room with, the two other women in the play, Big Mama and May, who are fabulous. They’re really experienced, and were sort of helping me too. And they were like, “It’s a mad thing, but you’ll probably find the most stuff about the play in the final two days,” and that’s exactly what happened. I’m kind of excited to see what more I learn about it with more distance to it.

‍
Frecknall doesn’t just direct—she composes. Her distinctive approach to classical texts is precisely what reinvigorates these plays and keeps audiences returning. Her avant-garde musicality is front and center in this production, the omnipresent ticking metronome in the background, accompanied by a live grand piano that floods the space with notes that mirror the emotional shifts on stage, results in the hypnotic unraveling of inner turmoil, pain, and desire. Frecknall’s latest production is all about rhythm. It’s where movement, sound, and heightened emotion all collide.

‍
What were your favorite aspects of Williams’ storytelling? Do you find a sort of rhythm there, as an actor or as a director in that way?
Edgar-Jones: Well I don’t know about you, Frecks, but I think that it was so interesting how many lines he repeated in this play. There’s this amazing thing where you repeat the end of the previous act in the beginning of the act you’re doing, and I found it really amazing because of this idea of lies and truths. There’s a line where Maggie says, “Truth, truth, truth, what’s so awful about it?”

I found the rhythm of it so amazing. He’s a poet and there are some lines where you just can’t believe how beautiful they are. There’s one Maggie says, “Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone if the one that you love doesn’t love you.” And it’s these little bursts of absolute beauty that you could frame.

‍
‍
Frecknall: Yeah. It is quite different. I think structurally the play is odd. One of the challenges of productions is how you hold the rhythm across an evening, because it’s a long play and it’s a wordy play and it’s a very muscular play. I was very drawn to the fact that it’s a play in three acts, as Daisy said, and it’s written to have two breaks, and it’s written to repeat.
I think it’s interesting with Tennessee Williams, and particularly with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, you have to know what the rhythm is. He’s a musical writer and a poetic writer so the rhythm is very important to the success of the piece, and also can teach you things about play. But it’s very dangerous that if you serve the rhythm first and foremost, the play doesn’t work because you stop listening to it because it can fall into this southern lilt. You have to know the music and interrogate the music and then try not to play it. We literally had this metronome ticking all the way under it, so you’re sort of aware that there is this musical drive that goes through the piece.

Edgar-Jones: Having mostly done TV and film for the last five years, I found it really interesting as an actor just learning how to [elucidate], because a lot of the sentences are quite long. There’s one sentence where she says, “Well, it didn’t surprise me, baby. I recognized this as soon as we got here last spring, and I’m willing to bet you that your brother and his wife are pretty sure of it, too. They’re more than likely.” You know, it’s a crazily long sentence where you’re trying to keep your breath going for that long. I found that technically really challenging, but also really fun, you can’t help but drive the train.

‍
Considering Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was released 70 years ago now, so much of the world and our day-to-day life has changed. What qualities of the story make it relevant to you personally? What do you think remains resonant with the audience today and the timeless nature of this play?
Frecknall: I think the reason why Williams has sustained for so long and has such respect and reverence is due to what he writes about thematically. He’s writing from and in a specific time so sometimes there are elements of his plays that are really difficult, and particularly in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, there are real elements of racism and homophobia and misogyny, which sadly are not as far away from our contemporary life. I think we do have a sense of, “Well, we’re really far away from that now.” We’re really not, and actually it’s coming back around again. And I think that doing this play in this era where actually we feel like we’re moving backward in so much of that.

The idea of equality that people think we have now, we don’t. So it’s interesting sometimes to actually show that maybe these plays are not a million miles away from where we are now, and that’s also interesting politically.

Williams’s extended interrogation is about humanity and the human soul, and love and what that is and how difficult that can be in a hard world, I suppose. I think he’s always interested in how much we need intimacy, and how hard that is to achieve, and I feel like he’s often digging into senses of the desperate need for connection, and the destructive power of grief. I think those things circle around all of his work.

What’s so sad about Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is that he’s showing how repressing our nature and our experience and our trauma will turn, will calcify, and will turn toxic and will start to kill our relationships in the present time.

‍
Edgar-Jones: I remember those biographies you left on the table. I think Williams wrote of Cat, that because the characters are hard to like, there’s this whole question of who can you root for? And I think he wrote something like, “What you can root for isn’t a person but the quality in people that makes them want to survive, that kind of vitality, that need to live.” And, like Freck said, I think the interesting thing about Cat is this idea that if you push down your nature or you ignore it or you or you oppress it, that it does calcify you and it stops you living.

‍
Following her box-office success in Twisters, starring alongside Glen Powell, and with her final show out of the way, Edgar- Jones is now gearing up for the highly anticipated release of On Swift Horses. The film follows Muriel (played by Edgar-Jones), her husband Lee (Will Poulter), and his brother Julius (Jacob Elordi) as they navigate a complex love triangle in the post-Korean War era. With On Swift Horses hitting cinemas this April, audiences will be eager to follow Edgar-Jones as she continues her journey into complex and layered American characters.

‍
Let’s talk On Swift Horses. The wide release is coming in April—how has your experience been?

Edgar-Jones: That I filmed a few years ago now, which is sort of wild but I’m so excited for it to come out. It’s a beautiful story about love and self-discovery, also set in the 50s. I suppose our version of Cat was in this poetic world, but interesting to be, it’s about love and identity and exploration of queerness in that time. So there is thematically, quite a lot in common with Cat. But I’m so excited for it to come out. It’s a really lyrical, beautiful story about young love and in a time where it was hard to be your authentic self. I really can’t wait for it to come out. I’m so excited. 

You’ve played a lot of roles in iconic Americana settings: Crawdads, Twisters, so forth. What about that world fascinates you?
Edgar-Jones: Yeah, I’ve weirdly had a monopoly on Southern characters. It’s really strange. I mean, I actually think one thing that I think is interesting is in Cat, there’s this storm at the end of the play, this incredible thunderstorm that is sort of punctuating the dialogue. There’s the rolls of thunder and, obviously, I filmed a film all about weather—Twisters, and Crawdads was very much about being out under the big sky.

I do find that really amazing. There’s something about the natural world, and especially in that part of the world where it’s so massive, like thunderstorms that will shake your bed, and tornadoes, and this sort of incredible, mad thing that nature can produce. These tropical storms that I witnessed in New Orleans when I was filming Crawdads happened so quickly and immediately, everywhere was flooded. It’s been amazing to be in, and inhabit characters from, that part of the world, because I do think that being that close to something so much bigger than you does make you interrogate your humanity.

I think that’s maybe something I find in that final act, that these very human interpersonal dynamics that are then juxtaposed to this sort of insane, all-encompassing, omnipotent thunder that makes you realize how petty and small these trials and tribulations of humanity are—some of them, you know. 

What do you hope, both of you, that the audience takes away from this production when they leave?
Frecknall: I feel like the way that I work as a director and my interest in theater and storytelling is not didactic at all. So I don’t really approach plays with a sense of going, and I want this to be the message. A lot of the time in my productions, I try to keep endings quite purposefully ambiguous because I think there’s room for interpretation. I’ve had shows where some people have found the endings really hopeful and some people have found the same ending really tragic because they’ve just interpreted something in a different way.

As soon as you label something, you’re putting a demand on a viewer to try and crack the code of what you’ve done. So I don’t really like to do that, but I do hope that people come away from the play having somehow connected to their deeper sort of sense of humanity in some way.

Edgar-Jones: I agree. I hope people have come away with more questions than when they came in with, which is interesting because I do think the way Frecks has put this production on, but also the genius of the text, is that it can continue to develop and make you wonder and curious and strike up conversations for weeks afterward. I’ll still be curious about so many turns and twists in that play.

I think that’s the joy of beautiful art. It makes you curious. It makes you have interesting conversations. It forces dialogue about your personal experience of it.

Photographed by Pip

Styled by Oliver Volquardsen

Written by Alisha Chopra

Hair: Earl Simms at Caren Agency using Sam McKnight

Makeup: Nikki Wolf

Nails: Chisato Yamamoto at Caren Agency using Gucci Beauty

Flaunt Film: Rodney Rico

Photo Assistant: Emmanuel Robert 

Production: Georgie Lawn 

Location: Hackney Studios