Emily Browning plays young women who look as if they will break and then do not. On screen she is small, still and watchful, and the films around her keep talking over her; the good ones let her be quiet.
Fi1m perspective
Frances Shea meets Reggie Kray over tea in Legend (2015), and Emily Browning does almost nothing. She sits, she listens, she lets a smile arrive late. Tom Hardy is doing the talking, as he does for most of the film, and yet it was her face we watched, because she is the only person at the table working out what she has walked into. That is the thing Browning does: she thinks on screen, quietly, and waits for us to catch up.
The career has been stop-start, and some of the stopping was her own. She began as a child on Australian television from 1998, then went to Hollywood for Ghost Ship (2002) and the lead as Violet Baudelaire in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004). Then she went home to finish school. She came back with The Uninvited (2009), Sucker Punch (2011) and, the same year, Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty, and has said she would "rather make an interesting film that gets people talking, that maybe some people hate, than make the kind of 'entertaining' film that everyone feels ambivalent about". The choices since bear that out: Pompeii (2014), Legend, four years as Laura Moon in American Gods (2017–2021), and lately comedy at home in Class of '07 (2023).
The pattern critics notice, and we notice too, is the doll who turns out to have a spine. She looks as though she will break, the parts lean on that, and the interest is always in the moment the fragility turns out to be a decision. In Legend it is the point where she stops being the girl who fell for Reggie and becomes the woman who is frightened of him, and Browning makes the change in her eyes and shoulders without a line to help her. We felt her fear well before the film got round to telling us about it, and then it told us, in voiceover, and kept telling us, until the thing we had seen for ourselves was explained back to us. Brian Helgeland wrote her a commentary that describes the marriage we are already watching, and it turns a good, watchful performance into a guided tour.
That is the recurring problem, and it is not hers. The bigger studio films have handed her archetypes to fill, Pompeii among them, and the smaller ones have sometimes asked for so much stillness that some reviewers found her opaque; we have not reviewed Sleeping Beauty and will not judge it here. But the complaint is the other face of what she is good at. An actor who works by withholding needs a director who trusts the withholding, and Helgeland did not, quite.
Somebody should write her a part with no narrator, put her in a room with one other person, and leave the camera on her while she decides what to do about it.
Biography
Emily Jane Browning is an Australian actress. She was born on 7 December 1988 in Melbourne, Victoria.
Browning made her screen debut in the television film The Echo of Thunder (1998) and appeared in Australian series including Blue Heelers (2000–2002). Her breakthrough came with the horror film Ghost Ship (2002). She received the Australian Film Institute International Award for Best Actress for playing Violet Baudelaire in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004).
Browning is known for roles in Sucker Punch (2011), The Host (2013), Pompeii (2014) and as Frances Shea in Legend (2015). She starred as Laura Moon in the series American Gods (2017–2021).
