The British actress, who broke out on HBO’s Game of Thrones, opens up about starring in the most anticipated title of the 2024 Cannes Film Fest.
Coppola’s epic casts Emmanuel in a starring role opposite Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Fishburne and Jason Schwartzman.
“The movie feels like a real call to arms,” she says. “It asks big questions. In spite of all the horrible, hard and devastating realities of the world that we live in, how can we make it better? It feels like there’s hope or a possibility for something better.”
Megalopolis centers on an ambitious architect named Caesar (Driver), who wants to rebuild New Rome — a city similar in size and scope to New York — as a utopia following an apocalyptic disaster.
Emmanuel describes her character, Julia Cicero, as the “beloved daughter” of Esposito’s character, the first African American mayor of New Rome. “She finds herself very intrigued by Caesar. He also happens to be her father’s kind of archnemesis, so she finds herself stuck between these two worlds and trying to work out her place in it.”
Coppola’s hopes of making the film date back to the 1980s, after a historic run that saw him deliver 1972’s best picture Oscar winner, The Godfather, followed by the Gene Hackman starrer The Conversation and The Godfather Part II (both best picture nominees in 1975), and 1979 epic best picture nominee Apocalypse Now, Coppola still didn’t have enough juice to get the ambitious Megalopolis off the ground.
He revisited it many times over the years by polishing the script, and it looked close to going forward until the 9/11 terrorist attacks forced another delay.
In 2019, on the eve of his 80th birthday, Coppola said that he was ready to make the “unusual” production happen once and for all on a grand scale with a huge cast. A global pandemic forced yet another delay.
After the pandemic delay, the actress was in Budapest filming the horror thriller The Invitation when Megalopolis resurfaced. “I had a call with Francis over Zoom,” she details of a meeting that morphed into an audition of sorts. “We played a fun game where he asked me to select a line from a song, a movie, a poem, anything. To be honest, I can’t remember what I chose in the end, but he asked me to say that line in different scenarios. Say it like the butt of a joke, like you’re breaking really bad news to somebody, like you’ve just heard the worst news in the world, like you’re celebrating, just over and over in all these different ways. That’s how we talked and got to know each other.”
Emmanuel’s reps called with the good news that she got the part. Shooting started in Atlanta in November 2022 and continued through March 2023, but before cameras started rolling, Emmanuel recalls a week of rehearsals with more theater-style games, much like her Zoom audition. “It was a fun way to help the actors get connected, be playful and spontaneous,” she says. That sense of adventure continued through production and when asked to sum up the experience of working on Megalopolis, Emmanuel leans on one word: “Surprising.”
Emmanuel continues, “There were days when we went in and you sort of asked yourself, ‘What’s going to happen today?’ A lot of people can relate to this idea, and I know I can be this way, you can tether to a place where you feel secure and safe, but sometimes jumping into the unknown is freeing. It’s scary but freeing as well. I came up against myself quite a lot, and got to meet myself quite a few times. As an actor, as an artist, as a human being, it’s always good to meet yourself and just go for it. What’s that saying? ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway.’ ”
The cast supported one another: “Everyone was so committed to be in service of realizing this story that has been in Francis’ mind growing, evolving and percolating for 40 years,” she says.
Emmanuel, who has another starring role in the upcoming release of The Killers for Jon Woo, says she hopes Megalopolis leaves audiences feeling hopeful. “It’s a love letter to humanity,” she concludes. “In a world that can feel so unrelenting and painful and devastating at times, I hope people take away a hope for something better and a knowledge that we can have agency in that.”
