Emily Cox plays women who say the thing everyone else is thinking and then pick up a weapon. As Brida in The Last Kingdom she let the years show on her face, the one person in the cast who visibly changed.
Fi1m perspective
Brida spends most of The Last Kingdom telling Uhtred he is wrong, and she is usually right. Emily Cox plays her with nothing softened: hair scraped back, clothes cut for fighting rather than for the camera, a stare that arrives a beat before the insult. She is fierce, funny and unforgiving, and her arguments with Alexander Dreymon's Uhtred about which side they belong to are the best-written stretches of the series. The plot, as we said at the time, goes round in circles. She is the one person in it who visibly changes.
That was the part that took her out of German-language television, where she had been working since training at Vienna's Max Reinhardt Seminar and starting on stage at the Theater in der Josefstadt. Before it there was Marie Kreutzer's The Fatherless (2011), a zombie film called Rammbock: Berlin Undead (2010) and, later, improvised comedy alongside Christian Ulmen in jerks. (2017–2020). Then Brida, across all five series from 2015 to 2022 and into the closing film The Last Kingdom: Seven Kings Must Die (2023). Since then she has taken English-language series work in Constellation (2024) and a lead in the German dark comedy Murder Mindfully (2024), while still moving between Berlin and Vienna.
Uhtred is wronged, fights, and is wronged again, and Dreymon finds a weariness in him eventually. Brida gets there first and goes further: she is plainly a different woman in the fifth series from the girl in the first, and Cox carries the years in how she stands and how little she smiles. We were moved, more than we expected, by how the losses pile up on these two across the run and by how Cox lets each one stay on Brida rather than shaking it off between episodes. The fighting is real, and it is never the point. The sword is what Brida holds while she says the thing nobody wants said.
The scripts did not always keep up. In the first series Brida is written thinner than she is played, and by the last the show pushes her somewhere extreme that split its audience; we will not describe it, except to say it asks a great deal of Cox and she does not blink. Cox once said she liked to think of Brida as the first feminist, which is a large claim, but watching her you can see what she means.
She has done comedy, in jerks. and now Murder Mindfully, and the stillness is there too when a director wants it. If Brida is the only thing you have seen her in, the comedy is the place to look next, if only to watch her hold a scene without anything sharp in her hand.
Biography
Emily Cox is an Austrian actress of Irish-British heritage. She was born on 23 February 1985 in Vienna, where she grew up. Her parents, both pianists, had moved to the city on a musicians' grant; they later divorced. After graduating from high school in 2003, Cox developed an interest in acting through a school play and studied at the Max Reinhardt Seminar. In 2008 she held a contract as a stage actor at the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna.
Cox moved to Berlin in 2011 and has since appeared in numerous German and Austrian television productions, including several Tatort films. She is best known internationally for her role as Brida in the series The Last Kingdom (2015–2022) and the film The Last Kingdom: Seven Kings Must Die (2023). Other credits include Homeland (2011), Jerks. (2017–2020), Rammbock: Berlin Undead (2010), Futuro Beach (2014) and Constellation (2024).
