Emma Corrin is doing things their way

A figure so famous, so obsessively watched and so deeply beloved was not an easy place to begin – but Emma Corrin took to the role of Diana, Princess of Wales, as if, according to The Crown’s creator Peter Morgan, they were “born to play this part”. Corrin, unknown before the press announcement of the casting, perfectly embodied the teenage Diana: half child, half adult, at once gangly and chatty, flirtatious and coy. It remains Corrin’s favourite role. “I had so much fun. So much fun,” says the 28-year-old actor, who uses they/them pronouns, from their Hampstead home, dressed in a black button-up cardigan and sporting a freshly shaven head.

Following The Crown, Corrin looked set on an art-house, Tilda Swinton-esque path of theatre and literary adaptations, often tied up in the corsets and hair pins of period pieces. They brought their impish charisma to Anna X, a West End play inspired by the Russian scammer Anna Sorokin; a steamy adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover for Netflix; then a hit adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando at the Garrick Theatre. There have since been big-ticket offers, such as Disney+’s A Murder at the End of the World, in which Corrin plays a pink-haired Gen-Z detective, and the upcoming Nosferatu, out next year, which will be a sumptuous gothic vampire tale. Meanwhile, filming is underway for Marvel’s Deadpool 3, in which they star with Ryan Reynolds, Matthew Macfadyen and Jennifer Garner. The comic book adaptation should confirm Corrin’s place in the upper echelons of Hollywood. It’s “mind-blowing,” says Corrin of the project. “I’ve never been involved in anything on that scale.”

There was a ring, a circle, for me, my mum and her mum

Corrin seems unfazed by the limelight. In conversation they are without any ego: just calm and reflective. Raised in Tunbridge Wells by a South African businessman father and speech-therapist mother, they studied education, English and drama at Cambridge, and had a successful career at the student theatres, playing Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and directing a production of Jez Butterworth’s Mojo. We were at Cambridge at the same time so I saw them in various things: Corrin always had a slightly starry, professional glow about them and made it look easy to inhabit someone else’s mind. You wanted to watch them because they seemed so compellingly unselfconscious.

But that’s the work of it, Corrin says. In reality, “you have to be aware of what you’re feeling, what the other person in the scene is feeling. And then you have this third level of awareness if you’re in a film set: everything going on around you, your mark, the light, which way you should be facing. And it’s like you are constantly having to juggle those three things the whole time.” The moments of purest enjoyment come “when someone shouts action and you’re able to let everything go, and then it’s you and maybe a few other people in a scene, and I can let it go to the point that I can be surprised”. Theatre still represents “the most acute version of that,” says Corrin, “which is why I love it so much – it’s a playground. By the 10th or 12th night, you can just let it go and have fun with it. It’s so much fun, it’s the funnest thing ever. I love it. I miss it.”

Offstage Corrin has also evolved a unique persona, far removed from the conventional actor route. A styling collaboration with Harry Lambert, the man behind Harry Styles’ wardrobe, began in 2020 and has produced some immensely playful concoctions: under Lambert’s direction, Corrin has worn a JW Anderson dress that looked like a goldfish in a plastic bag, or another printed with balloons designed to look like boobs, or a skull cap with matching “claws”. Corrin also has a longstanding relationship with Miu Miu, walking the brand’s catwalk in gold sequin knickers; six months later they walked the Venice Film Festival red carpet in khaki green ones (one newspaper headline: “What your reaction to Emma Corrin’s pants says about you”). To Corrin, experimentation is quite standard: they’re just “exploring stuff”, as they said in an interview last year. “Since I was very little I’ve always enjoyed costumes,” they add. “I think I enjoyed the imagination involved. It feels like you’re a character.” 

And now, Corrin is joining forces with Cartier to celebrate the centenary of the Trinity ring, the brand’s famed three-gold-band design. “You can’t really do much that’s creative unless you feel tied to it personally somehow,” they say. They bought the ring for their mother a few years ago, “and it felt nice to do that for her, to get her a piece of jewellery, and especially of that sort of quality. I’d never been able to do that before.” 

Corrin remembers buying the rings, then taking a picture of their hands together. “There was something about the fact there were three circles in the ring and we were both wearing them, and it made you think about generations and the cyclical nature of things. Me, my mum and her mum, who has passed now, we were always really, really close. And something me and my mum talked about was how there was a ring, a circle, for each of us. And that was kind of always going to tie us together.”

While Corrin is currently in a relationship with the actor Rami Malek, they’ve still managed to lay claim to some kind of normal life. “I still live with the same gang, and that’s heaven. They don’t let you get away with anything. Because ultimately, you’ve left a really mouldy aubergine in the fridge, and [your housemate] is furious,” they laugh. “It’s a lovely grounding.” 

As the year amps up, and the calls of the waiting Marvel fanbase grow louder, those moments will become more important than ever. “I always feel like I’m trying to get time back,” says Corrin. “I just want to walk my dog and sit in a pub.” Doing what they enjoy. Wearing what they like. It seems to be working so far.

Hair, Daniel Martin. Make-up, Gina Kane at Caren using Victoria Beckham Beauty. Photographer’s assistants, Hayleigh Longman and Max Brown. Stylist’s assistants, Ella Bacon and Naomi Phillips. Production, Parent. Retouching, Hand of God. Special thanks to Spring Studios