The Five Rising Acting Stars You Need To Watch Out For This Autumn

Emilia Jones

The Coda breakout on the healing process of filming crime drama Task

In 2021, When Emilia Jones’s film Coda came out, she says everything went ‘from zero to 100’. The indie coming-of-age tale, in which the then-19-year-old played the child of deaf adults in a fishing town, won three Oscars, including Best Picture, and secured her a Bafta nomination for her heartfelt performance. ‘It was so surreal,’ she says of the lockdown success. ‘Everyone loved the movie. We made history with Troy [Kotsur’s Oscar win]. But the minute you put your phone down, it was like it wasn’t happening.’

The 23-year-old British actor was able to leverage that acclaim into being ‘picky’, having already clocked in several years on stage and screen. She’s since been lauded for her nuanced portrayal of Margot in Cat Person, a modern dating horror story, and will next take on a ‘posh real-estate agent’ in Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, as well as an ambitious
chef in Charlie Harper, a role she trained for at The Ritz in London. ‘I love playing
characters that are completely different to the parts I’ve just played,’ she says. ‘I want people to not know it’s me.’

In HBO’s upcoming crime mini-series Task, Jones is unrecognisable as Maeve, a young woman with tattoos and a mullet, ‘who’s had a tough upbringing, grown up with a drug gang and has the weight of the world on her shoulders’, she says. It was a cathartic experience for the actor, too: ‘Maeve came at an important time in my life; I was feeling down, I had been ill and no one knew what was wrong with me, so I felt I needed to play her to feel better.’ The role did just that, and now she’s well on her way to character-actor status.

Aggy K Adams

The star of The Couple Next Door on the power of scriptwriting

Lulu McArdle

Aggy K Adams has been making waves ever since her breakthrough in 2019’s Oh, Ramona!, a Romanian coming-of-age film in which she played the eponymous role. Since then, the British-Polish actor has appeared in French comedy series Greek Salad and American sci-fi thriller Altered, and enthralled viewers as alluring Norwegian nurse Mia in the second series of British psychological thriller The Couple Next Door. But the key to the 30-year-old’s success is her refusal to embrace the tropes projected onto her characters, such as Mia. ‘I understand the world sees her as a seductress, but I don’t focus on that because there’ll be no depth,’ she says. ‘[As Mia] I’m lonely as hell in a foreign country where people are quite stand-offish, and this is how I explain all of my actions. I don’t mind how people see things, because I know what story I’m telling.’

Now Adams is doing ‘a lot of manifesting’. She would love to star in a period piece, ‘going back and seeing how women had to be in the 1950s’, she explains. ‘I have so much compassion for those women, so I’d love to explore how that felt.’ She has a strong desire to make the type of films she’d buy tickets for at film festivals, too. ‘Not every festival movie is good, but it seems like the stories are created from a real place of need,’ she says. ‘I want to tell incredible stories and portray great characters for great directors.’ And she’s even working on a few personal projects to boot. ‘The more I act, the more I learn about writing,’ she says. ‘So I’m developing my own scripts – it’s my way of empowering myself.’

Shalom Brune-Franklin

The Dune lead swaps sci-fi for a psychological thriller

Lulu McArdle

Since 2016, Shalom Brune-Franklin has been charming audiences around the world with her diverse range of rich, complex characters. Appearing in popular BBC dramas Our Girl and Line of Duty, as well as black comedies such as Baby Reindeer and The Assassin – the latter for which she teamed up again with The Tourist showrunners Harry and Jack Williams – she throws herself into every role she gets. ‘Sometimes you have moments when you read the script and go, ‘If I don’t get that, I should quit because that is perfect,’’ says the British-Australian actor of Mauritian and Thai heritage. ‘It’s a ridiculous and extreme way to think, but there are those characters that just resonate, where you feel like you can add so much to the script that you have to be a part of it.’

That was the case for Dune: Prophecy, the TV spin-off of the blockbuster sci-fi franchise, in which the 31-year-old plays Fremen rebel Mikaela. ‘I loved it, but it was really overwhelming,’ she says of the major following that comes with such huge IP. ‘Normally, when I finish a show, I just hope people will watch it, and Dune: Prophecy was more terrifying because there’s going to be an audience, so it’s about whether it lives up to the expectation. I remember it being quite exciting but also crippling for everyone on set.’ Up next, Brune-Franklin will star alongside Robin Wright in the psycho-logical thriller series The Girlfriend and opposite Bella Ramsey in George Jaques’ upcoming feature Sunny Dancer, playing a child therapist at a summer camp for young people affected by cancer. ‘It’s such a beautiful story and was an all-round enriching creative experience,’ she says. ‘I love doing this job – I’m living the dream.’

Ella-Rae Smith

From romance to horror, this British talent can do it all

Lulu McArdle

This year marks a decade in the business for the ebullient Ella-Rae Smith, who began acting aged 17 and has made a captivating impression in various genres across film and TV. On the small screen, the 27-year-old has appeared as effervescent socialite Phoebe in the thriller Clique, gifted enforcer Nix in the action series Into the Badlands and cunning Queen Sareth I in the sci-fi epic Foundation – all characters she has ‘poured a bit of myself into’, she says. ‘I like feeling and experiencing things that would never happen in my daily life.’

It’s why she signed on to DW Medoff’s Your Host, a cabin-in-the-woods set-up where four friends are tortured by a deranged man. Horror isn’t a genre that Smith is a particular fan of but, despite the film’s script being filled with ‘violence and gore’, it piqued her curiosity. ‘Being scared for your life every single moment is not something I feel day to day, so it seemed such an interesting thought experiment to go through that,’ she says. ‘I got offered
the role and thought,“This is going to be fun. This is exciting. This is new. This is different.’’’

Cinema is where Smith’s heart lies and, after earning acclaim in 2021’s endearing coming-of-age romance Sweetheart, she hopes to make bigger contributions to the silver screen. ‘Film is the most accessible form of art,’ she says. ‘It’s a combination of all the different arts in one piece, and it makes me so happy.’ And when she looks back at her body of work, it’s a beautiful reminder of where she’s been and where she wants to go next with her career.

‘I’ve supported myself since I was 17, and every project is a time capsule of a certain period of my life,’ Smith says. ‘I love bringing someone else’s vision to life, but writing gives you the power, some form of creative control, and I’ve been writing for a few years now.’

Millie Brady

With two upcoming films, this model-turned-actor is one to watch

Lulu McArdle

Millie Brady is a natural in front of the camera, but it hasn’t always been easy. A former model who began working in the industry as a child, she describes years spent overcoming hang-ups about her body and emotional insecurities. Once she switched gears into acting, however, she ‘started to learn that I had autonomy over myself’, she says. ‘I thought that I had to be eloquent, that I had to hide all of my silliness, but I’m at a point in my career where I’m proud of the work I’ve done and proud of the person I am.’

And so she should be. At 31, the British actor has already built an impressive showcase of character work, from wealthy cellist Eliza with her suitcase full of familial and romantic discontent in the second season of Surface, to her captivating performance in Irish sci-fi thriller Double Blind as Claire, a test subject who must stay awake or die. There was also a small but significant turn in The Queen’s Gambit as French model Cleo. ‘She’s this really sexually confident French woman,’ she says. ‘It was the proudest that I’ve been of a role, because it was so far from who I am.’

And Brady isn’t slowing down, having just wrapped two films. In Trash TV, she flexes her comedic muscles as an executive producer of a ‘Jerry Springer-style TV show’ who is ‘grappling with how dark that world is, the ethics of it and the fact she wants to rise in this industry’, she explains. Then there’s Clio Barnard’s screen adaptation of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, based on the book by Keiran Goddard, which offers Brady a chance to break ground in the social-realist genre she adores. ‘You’re lifting the curtain into a person’s life in such a heartbreaking, relatable way, while not doing anything that feels dramatic for the sake of it,’ she says. ‘Parts for women are definitely getting more interesting.’

Talent wears Chanel fashion and jewellery throughout.

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