Emma D'Arcy
Emma D'Arcy is an actor, born 1992.
Emma D'Arcy had a short and sharply chosen television career before House of the Dragon, and the choices are worth reading. Naomi in Wanderlust, a BBC drama about a marriage renegotiating its own rules. A small part in Baptiste. Alma in Wild Bill. Astrid in Truth Seekers, a horror comedy that had no business being as good as it turned out. The films arrived at the same time: Hazel in Misbehaviour and Emma Hobday in Mothering Sunday, both period pieces, both roles about young women being managed by other people.
Then Rhaenyra Targaryen. House of the Dragon asks D'Arcy to inherit a character the audience has already met in another performer's hands and to make that switch feel inevitable, which is a structural trap, and they came out of it with two Golden Globe nominations.
What they do with Rhaenyra is refuse to play her as a heroine. The performance is watchful and increasingly cold, built out of long silences in rooms full of people who want something, and it keeps the political material genuinely ambiguous rather than tilting the show towards one claimant. D'Arcy is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, and the casting has made them one of the most visible faces in prestige television without any of the work looking like a statement.
Movies (3)
TV (5)
Where to start with Emma D'Arcy
The obvious answer is also the correct one, so House of the Dragon it is. Start from the beginning of the first season rather than skipping to their episodes, because the handover is part of the effect, and Rhaenyra reads completely differently if you have watched the younger version of her lose things first.
Mothering Sunday is the best of the films: a quiet English period drama in which D'Arcy plays a young woman whose engagement is everybody else's project.
Truth Seekers is the surprise, a ghost-hunting comedy with real affection in it, and Astrid is the strangest character they have played. Wanderlust is the pre-fame one, worth it for the theatre-trained stillness. Misbehaviour is a solid ensemble piece about the 1970 Miss World protest, and Wild Bill is the throwaway.