Aspiring young actors flock to Hollywood in search of fame the same way birds migrate south in the winter: instinctively. Emma Myers, however, took the road less traveled: from Orlando, Florida, to Bușteni, Romania.
In 2021, Myers swapped the sun-drenched Magic Kingdom for the gothic, gloomy Cantacuzino Castle—the set of Netflix’s Addams Family spinoff-hit coming-of-age show, Wednesday. Myers had booked the part of Enid Sinclair, the werewolf best friend and roommate to Wednesday Addams, played by Jenna Ortega.
“I’m a completely different person from when I first arrived in Romania to when I left,” she says. “It was my first big job. And it was my first job of that length. I matured a lot.”
Four years later, the 23-year-old actress is back home, awaiting the release of Wednesday’s second season, out later this year, and promoting the video game–inspired A Minecraft Movie, in which she stars alongside Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Jennifer Coolidge, and Danielle Brooks.
Myers knew she wanted to be an actress since she was a little girl, when her father introduced her to fantasy films such as The Lord of the Rings. “They used to release those huge, almost-movie-length behind-the-scenes [interviews],” she says. “I watched them all the time thinking, Oh, I want to do that.”
She and her three sisters were all homeschooled by her mother, which gave Myers the flexibility to pursue acting—joining the community theater when she was seven and auditioning for grocery-store and theme-park commercials as well as voice-over gigs. Myers jokes that people in Hollywood are more surprised by the fact that she’s from Florida than that she was homeschooled. (Her native Floridians have the opposite reaction. “It’s a combination of two weird things,” she says.)
Eventually, the small, local roles paid off.
Myers fondly recalls the afternoon when her life changed, picking up a call from her manager in her childhood bedroom, where the cell service was faulty. “Do you think your phone signal is gonna be better in Romania?” her manager asked her, pausing for effect. She had booked Wednesday.
“My sisters came into my room to celebrate with me,” she says, “and I think that’s the best reaction I’ve ever gotten out of them for anything.”
Since then, Myers has starred in the 2023 feel-good comedy Family Switch, alongside Jennifer Garner and Ed Helms, and played the protagonist and amateur sleuth Pip Fitz-Amobi in the 2024 Netflix series A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, based on the whodunit by Holly Jackson. “I tried,” she says with a shrug when I ask her about learning to act in a British accent, telling me that she only had two weeks to figure it out.
Playing the world-building video game of Minecraft was not a prerequisite for acting in her latest film, but Myers admits it came with the territory. “Jack [Black] is always showing us that nothing’s ever really that serious,” says Myers. “You can have fun while you’re working. So I’ve tried to adopt that into my kind of work routine.”
With filming wrapped, Myers says she plans to “phase into [her] couch and become one with it,” and to “do things that make [her] feel alive and free while [she] can.” This will include reading fantasy books like Assassin’s Apprentice, playing video games, and spending time with her sisters. From what I can tell, she means in that order.
A Minecraft Movie is now playing in theaters
Carolina de Armas is a Junior Editor at Air Mail
