who ran the groundbreaking reality show Big Brother.
Although she acted with the National Youth Theatre as a teen,
she never attended drama school or university, and got her
first part—a small recurring role in the British comedy-drama
series Cold Feet—while still at school. “I came in kind of like
Marianne—a bit of an outsider,” she says. While Mescal is
a theater veteran, having starred in several high-profile Dublin
productions, Edgar-Jones is only now taking on her first
professional play. She’s spent the morning in rehearsals for the
Almeida Theatre’s production of Albion, a state-of-the-nation
drama about England’s chronic nostalgia for a grander past.
For Lenny Abrahamson, who directed Normal People
along with Hettie Macdonald, the casting process was all
about finding “the right pair.” On the phone from Dublin,
he tells me that while they had Mescal penciled in for
Connell within days, finding Marianne took months. “Close
to when we were beginning to get really worried, along came
Daisy,” he recalls. Once the two actors were in the same room,
Abrahamson became aware of an “ineffable” chemistry
between them. “It’s not unlike what draws people together
in life,” he says. “You can feel this amazing spark.”
Both actors recount that the five months of filming were
extraordinarily intense. “It cost a lot,” says Mescal, “in terms
of energy and time and what you can give to other people.”
Rooney’s descriptions of intimacy in Normal People are
startlingly unvarnished, and its directors remained faithful to
that spirit, meaning Edgar-Jones and Mescal spent more
time naked together during filming than some real-world
couples might over the same period. Both had partners at
the time (although Mescal and his girlfriend have since broken
up), and Edgar-Jones insists that the fact they were simply
“great friends” made the sex scenes easier to manage. “I think
if I had to do those scenes with Tom,” she says, referring to
her boyfriend, the actor Tom Varey, “I would probably have
been completely self-conscious.” Mescal compares the role
of an on-set intimacy coordinator to that of a stunt coach:
“I can’t imagine doing a show like Normal People without one.”
Before Normal People took off, Edgar-Jones was studying
for an Open University degree, and she’s clearly someone
drawn toward schemes for self-improvement. A non-exhaustive
list of current activities includes reading (most recently Ann
Patchett’s The Dutch House), visiting art exhibitions, and
doing daily yoga videos. For Mescal, time spent not working
is a bit more of a puzzle. He reluctantly gave up Gaelic
football after a broken jaw during drama school taught him
the two passions “don’t coexist, unfortunately.” Although
he dabbles in photography and plays the piano, he has yet to
find a hobby that can fill the sizable void left by competitive
sport. “I’m figuring that I’m not good in the downtime,”
he says. But a new start beckons: He’ll be spending more time
in London in the coming months.“Professionally, I think
it’ll be maybe the right time to be over there,” he explains. In
London, living only a few miles from each other, the two
actors will wait and see whether Normal People will elevate
their lives to something far from ordinary. Is Edgar-Jones
ready for the sort of fame where you deliberately don’t choose
to eat lunch in a huge, street-facing window, as she has
done today? “I’d probably find that a wee bit odd,” she says,
smiling.—harriet fitch little
A new Italian-born natural skin-care
brand is elevating farm-to-face beauty.
It was while conceptualizing her
adorably packaged Bambini Furtuna
line of holistic children’s health remedies that Agatha
Luczo started thinking about Furtuna Skin. “I also
want high-performance products that are good for
me,” recalls the noughties Croatian supermodel
and mother of four, whose sprawling 865-acre organic
farm in Sicily serves as the inspiration for both lines.
The property, which once belonged to the grandmother
of Luczo’s husband, Stephen, CEO and chairman
of the tech firm Seagate, is home to wild-foraged
medicinal plants and rare olive trees that supply
crucial ingredients for products such as a face and
eye serum; the brand’s debut launch, it boasts an
antioxidant-packed olive-leaf water base. (“Why use
regular water when olive-leaf water has so many
extra benefits for your skin?” asks Luczo.) Furtuna’s
commitment to organic ingredients makes a
compelling case for this month’s micellar water, which
uses olive-enriched (instead of chemical) surfactants
to attract dirt and grease, and a nourishing, easily
absorbable bi-phase oil featuring a botanically infused
dose of the olive oil that the Luczos produce on the
farm (and sell at Williams-Sonoma). But a no-budget-
spared commitment to proven performance is
what truly sets them apart. “This is not just something
that I made up in my kitchen,” emphasizes Luczo,
who enlisted clean-beauty entrepreneur and Furtuna’s
cofounder Kim Walls to perfect the brand’s formulas.
“We’re testing the individual ingredients with facilities
associated with universities in Italy as well as in
the U.S.,” adds Walls, describing the discovery of a
completely natural preservative system that leverages
plants that protect one another from mold and
bacteria in nature, and do the
same thing in the bottle. Adds
Luczo, “I am a busy mom,
and I travel a lot, and I just want
all the nutrients my skin needs,
safely, without 16 different
products.” Supermodels: They’re
just like us.—celia ellenberg
SKIN CARE
FRUIT FOCUS
THE NEW BI-PHASE
OIL INCLUDES
OLIVE-LEAF WATER
AND OLIVE OIL
HARVESTED
FROM TREES ON
LUCZO’S ORGANIC
FARM IN SICILY.
VLIFE
72 APRIL 2020 VOGUE.COM
KARINA TAIRA
