If there’s one thing Emma Mackey’s titular heroine Emily Brontë is going to do in the new biopic Emily, it’s roll her eyes. A curate delivering a sensual sermon about God being “in the rain”, a feeble acquaintance requiring the assistance of multiple gentleman to climb over a stepping stile, her brother Branwell gleefully yelling “freedom of thought!” over the Yorkshire moors: all moments in which ladylike respectability gives way to a rebellious spirit. According to the 26-year-old French-British star, the facial expressions aren’t deliberate.

“That’s just my face, it moves a lot!” Mackey laughs. “There’s a lot going on.” If you’re a fan of traditional literary biopics, this should be enough to tell you that actor-turned-director Frances O’Connor’s new film is not going to stay faithful to the facts. “Usually there are rules. We are told that there are rules in filmmaking. And I don’t remember ever thinking, “fuck, it’s my close up and I’ve got to sit here and do this,” Mackey enthuses. “I was left freedom in those moments”.

It seems a fitting role, then, for a star who made her name as Maeve Wiley, the bad girl of Moordale Secondary School in Netflix’s hit sitcom Sex Education. Now, Mackey is embodying another rebel who refuses to conform to societal expectations in O’Connor’s debut feature, which dramatises the brief but extraordinary life of Emily Brontë. Best known for penning one of the most passionate novels of all time, Wuthering Heights, the most elusive Brontë sibling died from tuberculosis at the age of 30 just a year after its publication; but the new film posits that the author’s interior life was definitely colourful enough to have invented a gothic romance.

While Wuthering Heights is a story that will never get old, one look at the back-catalogue of period dramas will tell you that risk-taking is in short supply. The same could not be said for Emily, which blends fact and fiction as it imagines Brontë’s life in the years leading up to her writing one of English literature’s most iconic novels. The script, Mackey tells me, didn’t feel “pretentious and stuffy”, which excited her. “A lot of period dramas genuinely feel like sort of tableaus of kind of historical characters,” she explains. “But I felt like this had a real different energy to it.”

The mystery shrouding Emily Brontë is used by O’Connor to imagine the author as a woman ahead of her time. The shyest of the siblings, Emily was cruelly branded “the strange one” by villagers in Haworth, Yorkshire. But despite a lack of historical evidence to suggest that the writer ever had a lover, the film imagines that Emily had all-consuming affair with William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a real parish curate who worked alongside her widower clergyman father Patrick (Adrian Dunbar). Mackey, who studied English at Leeds University, dove deep into research after accepting the role, hoovering up biographies and films such as Sally Wainwright’s To Walk Invisible and André Téchiné’s French interpretation The Brontë Sisters starring Isabelle Adjani – “she was my hero” – as Emily. But the biographical facts, Mackey soon discovered, clashed with the fantastical script she was reading.

“I had to let go of also my preconceptions and my kind of formatting that’s quite academic and quite confusing sometimes,” she admits. “And it was so nice, just to let all of that go and let it be a blank canvas and let it just be a story. And it just so happens it’s a story about Emily Brontë; but she’s the starting point, not the be all and end all. It can be a coming of age story, if you like, it can be a story about religion, it can be a family drama, it can be a supernatural film… it oscillates between lots of different kinds of genres. And that’s what pleases me, because it feels like a real coming together of different worlds.”

If Emily Brontë is the queen of gothic romance, then it’s fitting that the supernatural spirit is alive and well in the film. Early on, there’s a genuinely spine-tingling scene where Emily, her siblings and Weightman play a game with a mask. When it’s Emily’s turn, she pretends to be possessed by her death mother, turning the happy revelry into a frightening séance-like situation that lays bare the siblings’ grief. “It felt like a real set piece, you know that moment,” Mackey recalls. “It’s an homage to the Brontë’s life in the books that they read and the environment in which they lived was very gothic. And, you know, the fascination for the supernatural. The Victorians are known for the forbidden. And so it’s really, really charged, full of that energy. And that scene is really potent for that reason, because it switches the tone up and it also gives you an insight into the fascination for playing games and ghost stories and all of these things.”

That Emily is in possession of a vivid imagination is clear. But O’Connor imbues her with a thoroughly modern sensibility, too. In this period piece, she’s not just wandering the moors for hours with a look of wide-eyed curiosity, but she’s bickering with her sisters, having fiery exchanges en français with Weightman, swigging rum and embarking on opium-fuelled trips with her beloved, wayward brother Branwell (played by Fionn Whitehead). “He’s the Heathcliff she’s the Cathy,” Mackey muses. “In many ways, you know, they are each other. And as much as he elevates her, he also is her downfall. It’s really extreme, and quite powerful what they have. So I love their relationship.” It’s emotional, too. When Branwell is sent away from the family home after seducing a married woman, Emily is heartbroken. They say their goodbyes to each other on either side of a bedsheet while Emily is hanging washing on the line, a scene so moving you’d be forgiven for thinking the siblings were actually forbidden lovers being broken apart.

Emily’s other romantic soulmate, of course, is Weightman. The film imagines that it was a passionate affair that set Emily on the path to writing her literary masterpiece, even though scholars believe that the curate actually had a romantic attachment to her younger sister Anne. “In the biographies, you know, there’s like two sentences about him,” Mackey says. “And I love that Frances took that and was like, ‘excuse me, what can we do with this?!’ and runs with it, I think it’s great”. Cue scenes of Weightman and Emily conducting their trysts on the straw-strewn floor of a cottage on the moors, which is even more plausible for the fact that the film was shot on Haworth in 2021, complete with real Yorkshire rain.

The illicit liaison certainly has a transformative effect upon Emily in the film, and it’s easy to see how her relationship could have inspired the characters of Cathy and Heathcliffe in Wuthering Heights. Mackey says she loves the confidence and “ferociousness” Emily gains through the affair, which is brilliantly explored through French lessons that turn into highly-charged sparring sessions. “I love that you see her from the very get-go be extremely acerbic with him and try and defend herself, and in the end, that the French lessons become their secret and their strength,” Mackey says. “And it’s a really beautiful thing to see that evolve and to see the two of them evolve in that way. That dynamic shifts so clearly and see her kind of take control. It’s really thrilling.”

Even so, Mackey is apprehensive about how the romantic origin story will go down with Brontë purists. “I was always nervous, because I know it’s quite a bold take on it,” she says. “And I know that potentially more fervent documented Brontë fans might not appreciate it.” At the same time, she believes there’s space for modern period dramas that push the boundaries. “This whole film is about: where do stories come from? What is imagination? And what can I do with it? What can I make of this? What can I make of all these thoughts and these starting points, that kind of are just seedlings in my head? Where can these go?”

Regardless of the liberties taken with the biographical facts, it’s a given that Mackey’s role in the film will introduce new audiences to Emily Brontë and her landmark work – something that makes her excited.

“I’m intrigued to see how it lands,” she says. “And I think that’s definitely what Frances wants and is definitely one of the goals of this film. If someone picks up a copy of Wuthering Heights after watching then great; if someone feels hopeful and galvanised enough that they want to go and write a story or make a film or go out and take photos or whatever it is and be creative, then great. I just hope that this film, in a small way, will at least provide a bit of escape for two hours and just transport people to somewhere else for a little bit. And give them a bit of hope; I think would be ideal.”

Emily is in cinemas now

Images: Michael Wharley