Emma Appleton
Emma Appleton is an actor, born 1991.
Modelling paid first. Appleton modelled as a teenager and moved into acting in 2017, going more or less straight to a lead: Fay Brookstone in the BBC Three thriller Clique. Two years later came Feef Symonds in Channel 4's spy thriller Traitors, and a small early part in Netflix's The Witcher as Renfri. The credits gathered here list the making-of documentary rather than the series itself.
The register she keeps getting hired for is withholding. Appleton plays people managing information: Feef, whose whole job is lying to the people she works with; Ingrid Lewis in The Killing Kind; Kelly in The End of the F***ing World; Thomasina Hanbury in LOLA, a film built to reward a performer who can suggest she knows more than she is saying. Sources disagree on whether LOLA belongs to 2022 or 2023, so take neither.
Everything I Know About Love handed her Maggie and a different problem: playing warmth inside a friendship drama rather than guardedness. Pistol asked for Nancy Spungen, a part that invites imitation and punishes it.
The work has stayed at the ambitious end of British television and film rather than chasing scale, through The Severed Sun, Gone and The Last Letter from Your Lover. She is at the stage of a career where one part decides the next ten years, and it has not arrived yet.
Movies (5)
TV (8)
Where to start with Emma Appleton
Traitors first. It is the fullest thing she has been given, a whole series resting on whether you believe her while she lies, and it sets the register almost everything else uses.
Then Everything I Know About Love, which finds the opposite gear and is far warmer than the thriller work suggests she can be. Pistol earns its place for the attempt at Nancy Spungen even when the series around it wobbles. Clique is where it started and is rougher than you might expect. LOLA is the most interesting formal experiment here. The End of the F***ing World and The Last Letter from Your Lover are small parts in better-known things, useful for context and little else. Her Witcher episode is not among the credits listed here; the documentary Making The Witcher is.