Daisy Edgar-Jones hailed next Julia Roberts thanks to way she bags film roles

She started off her career with roles in Cold Feet and Silent Witness, but after blockbuster success, there’s no stopping London’s biggest film export, says showbiz writer Nicole Lampert.

It’s (semi) official, according to Hollywood industry bible Variety – this is the summer of Daisy Edgar-Jones.

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The British actress, who found fame in BBC’s Normal People – the Sally Rooney-penned Irish drama we all fell in love with during the pandemic – is the star of Twisters, which has broken box-office records for first-week sales of any natural disaster movie, with takings having surpassed £250 million.

It’s exceeded all expectations of a tired film industry – US box-office sales have dropped by a third since 2019, and while Deadpool & Wolverine and Dune: Part Two have been successful, they are part of popular franchises, so it’s not surprising.

With Twisters, Daisy hasn’t just been a star in front of the camera, but a key part of the marketing strategy. From leading her co-stars Glen Powell and Anthony Ramos in a dance that went viral on social media to downing beer on stage at Luke Combs’ recent stadium concert, not to mention her edgy red-carpet style, she’s shown she is ready to put the graft in when many actors just do their contractual bare minimum.

“There is a reluctance [among actors] to do the heavy lifting that it takes to promote nowadays,” said Michael Moses, chief marketing officer at Universal, which distributed Twisters in the US, in an interview with Variety. “So many are like: ‘No, I’m a movie star. I don’t chug beer.’ It was really refreshing to have Daisy come in and not have to convince her. She just had an unerring sense of what it takes to connect with an audience, without it ever feeling performative or inauthentic.”

The humour that the 26-year-old actress has shown in hundreds of interviews around the world shows a growing confidence and goofiness that has already seen her hailed as the next Julia Roberts.

‘I want to make a living at being an actor because it’s what I love.’

This is all a far cry from Daisy’s first interview back in 2017 with the website of her former sixth-form college, Woodhouse in north London, where she studied for her A levels and got an A* in drama, A in English language, and B in history.

“I think to be a working actor is good enough for me – just to make a living at it because it’s what I love,” she said. “So, to be able to do it as a career is my ambition, even if it’s just little parts here and there on the radio or whatever… we’ll see.”

At the time, Daisy had just landed a small part in ITV’s Cold Feet. Now the world is at her feet. For many people in the entertainment industry, she has always had that indefinable star quality.

I was one of the first journalists to interview Daisy when she had her first meaty role at 20, in the TV series War Of The Worlds. It was early 2020, and I talked to her alongside her co-star, veteran actress Natasha Little, who told me there was something special about the London-born starlet. Daisy played Natasha’s visually impaired daughter.

“She was amazing,” Natasha told me, as Daisy blushed. “It’s her first big show and she was straight in there with the big stuff – visually impaired, alien attack, she did it all brilliantly.”

And Daisy told me she had learned a lot from watching Natasha: “Especially how to be on set. What I like about the way she works is really understanding the scene and why you are saying things, and making sure the words are truthful and honest. Natasha showed me how to get to the heart of a scene.”

A few months later, as Britain went into lockdown, I interviewed Daisy again over Zoom with her co-star Paul Mescal for Normal People. For those of us lucky enough to see the show early, it was clear that it would be popular, but it’s unlikely anyone expected a BBC3 drama about two Irish students to become one of the biggest global hits of 2020, attracting 62.7 million views on iPlayer alone. It was a role that would net Daisy her first Golden Globe nomination.

She inhabited the part of Marianne so well, and she told me that this was partly because her own experiences matched those of someone who was still trying to figure out who they are.

“There’s lots about Marianne that I really relate to, especially when she talks about going into school one day and trying to change who she was, to see if it would make a difference as to how people view her – and it doesn’t. I think I really connected to that feeling that I’d changed fundamentally from the ages of 11 to 16, but not being able to be my true self because everyone around me saw me in a certain way. It was going to college when I felt I could be the person I thought I was – and the same happened to Marianne.”

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Like Marianne, who falls in love with the son of her family’s cleaner, Daisy had a privileged middle-class upbringing in leafy Muswell Hill, north London. Her mother Wendy is a TV drama editor, while her father Philip was the creative director of Big Brother and is now an executive at Sky. An only child who spent much of her time with adults, she was also no stranger to the world of television, thanks to her parents’ careers. But that wasn’t why she went into acting. She felt she was academically behind many of her peers at her private day school – but when she went on stage, she felt at home.

Aged seven, a shy Daisy was cast as Anne Boleyn in a school play, in which her parents were shocked to see their well-behaved and reserved daughter pacing the stage as a furious wife.

“I strutted on stage with a fake head and gave it all this sass. Everyone thought it was really funny, and I thought: ‘I really love this,’” she recalled.

A few years later, she played Peter Pan in a school production. “My daughter was playing alongside her and Daisy shone, even then,” said a fellow parent.

‘The National Youth Theatre was the first place I felt like I fitted in.’

As with many actors, who only feel they can be themselves by inhabiting the skin of other people, acting was one of the few things that made Daisy feel confident. “When I was a teenager, I really believed in myself when it came to performance – in a way I wish I actually still had,” she told GQ in 2022. “I really was like: ‘I know what I’m doing in this arena alone. Everything else, I don’t really.’”

In contrast, she struggled in social situations, always worried that she was being judged by the person she was talking to. “I’m so concerned about how the other person is experiencing it that I’m not actually experiencing it myself,” she said.

She started keeping a diary when she was 14 and she still regularly journals. The first entry reads: “Hi, I’m Daisy. I have SUCH bad skin and I don’t have a boyfriend. I like the colour green and I love Coldplay.” She says that throughout her life, she’s had these same “silly anxieties.”

As a teen, she joined the National Youth Theatre, and a two-week induction camp when she was 15 made her certain of her career choice.

“I was with all these enthusiastic young people who love drama and we lived in student accommodation and worked together for two weeks. It was crazy, but it felt like the first time I really ‘fitted in’, as I was with people who were as passionate about drama as me,” she recalled.

It was also there, she told me, that she “learned about ways to get into the industry.” And while she had a few minor parts as a teen, it was an open audition for a part in Cold Feet that first put her on the map and also got her an agent.

“Cold Feet was a good place to start, because I had a small part so I could learn the scary things like walking in and not being self-conscious,” she said.

Bagging more roles in productions, including a special of BBC’s Outnumbered and two episodes of Silent Witness, prompted her to take a year off before university – she had planned to study drama at Manchester – while she funded herself working in Owen’s cafe near her home, where she was popular with locals.

The unexpected success of Normal People was to change everything, and was even more surreal because it was when the whole world changed for everyone.

When Britain went into the first lockdown, Daisy was a largely unknown aspiring actress – a few months later, she couldn’t go to her local supermarket without being mobbed. The show moved people – she has even met Normal People fans who have tattoos of her face.

‘Paul is an incredibly grounded person and I am, too’

There were rumours of a romance with co-star Paul, which were wide of the mark. At the time, Daisy was in a long-term relationship with her actor boyfriend Tom Varey, who she’d lived with over lockdown. They split in 2021 and, for the past year, she’s been in a relationship with photographer Ben Seed, 36, who previously dated actress Anya Taylor-Joy.

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But Daisy said recently that she still regards Paul as her best friend. The pair, who recently hung out together at Glastonbury, have a special bond. “He’s an incredibly grounded person and I am, too,” she told Variety last month. “We met when I was 20 and Paul was 22 – I’m so excited to see where we’ll be at 32, 42… and what life will bring us.”

“At Glasto, the thing that I was recognised for was Normal People, and usually people just say: ‘It meant so much to me.’ The thing I love people saying the most is: ‘It made me contact my ex,’ because I’m a massive romantic.”

Daisy’s and Paul’s careers have run parallel – while Daisy has had film success with Where The Crawdads Sing and Hulu TV show Under The Banner Of Heaven, Paul has starred in the critically acclaimed films All Of Us Strangers and Aftersun. For them both, this is their biggest year yet, with Paul about to star in the eagerly awaited Gladiator II.

“They have made brilliant career choices, showing off the full range of their acting chops,” says one Hollywood agent. “They must have had the pick of scripts after the success of Normal People, but the fact that they are both doing so well shows that there is much more to them than a one-hit wonder.”

Not that either of them is resting on their laurels. Daisy is now in the position to lobby for and win roles, as well as help get films made – as she did with Twisters when she wrote to director Lee Isaac Chung, saying she would love to read for the part.

“Daisy sent me a letter and I thought: ‘Wow, this is so well thought out and so eloquent,’ and that was striking to me,” he later recalled. “We met up after that, took a couple of very long walks along the Los Angeles River and just talked about the script. There was never an audition. Steven Spielberg was also a fan of Daisy. Once he found out that I was talking to her, he was very supportive, as was Universal. And that really tipped the scales.”

‘Daisy epitomises London style – classic but with a quirky edge’

That growing confidence can be seen on the red carpet, too, where she has really started to shine with the help of top stylist Dani Michelle, who has worked with the likes of Kendall Jenner.

“I think she’s becoming a style icon for London,” says Alexandra Standley, a personal stylist and sustainable fashion consultant. “I would say she epitomises the London style, which is classic but with a quirky edge, like her Vivienne Westwood dress, which she wore for the London premiere of Twisters.

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“She’s having fun with her style now she’s in the limelight. She’s pushing boundaries as her fame grows and it is great to see her becoming more confident.”

Style editor Samantha Harman adds: “People are really taking her seriously as a style icon, thanks to the looks from the Twisters tour. Unlike Margot Robbie for Barbie or Zendaya, who often styles to a theme, this has been more about positioning Daisy as someone with serious fashion credentials.”

Daisy hasn’t stopped working since Normal People and has two more projects on the go. Swift Horses, in which she plays a gambling addict, will again show her more serious side, while Voyagers – alongside Andrew Garfield – is being planned. Plus, there are talks of a Twisters sequel. Looks like the summer of Daisy isn’t going to lose its heat any time soon.

Daisy’s fashion days

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• Photography: Alamy, Getty Images, Getty Images/Antony Jones/BAFTA, Instagram/PE Jones, Shutterstock Editorial