On her 18th birthday, Emily Fairn was given the greatest gift she’d ever received: drama school. To study at one was all she wanted, and her mother offered to help, covering application fees and accompanying her to London for auditions. “My mom was like, ‘You know, your sister wants a car for her 18th. Do you not want some money towards a car?’ And I was like, ‘No!’” she laughs. It takes most applicants five years to gain admission to one of the United Kingdom’s top drama schools, but Fairn only had one shot. “I can’t afford for you to try again,” her mother warned. She needn’t have worried: Fairn got into the Guildhall School of Music and Drama right off the bat.
Since graduating in 2020, Fairn, 26, has landed lead roles in The Responder alongside Martin Freeman; in Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, with Willem Dafoe, Gabriel LaBelle, and Rachel Sennott; and, now, in House of Guinness, a new Netflix series premiering September 25.
Written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight and starring James Norton, Anthony Boyle, and Louis Partridge, House of Guinness follows Sir Benjamin Guinness’s four children as they navigate their father’s death and vie for control of his brewing empire. Fairn plays Lady Anne Plunket, the lone daughter and voice of reason among a sea of sons.
She didn’t always want to be an actor. Growing up in Liverpool, she was an academic child, often imagining that she’d study mathematics at Oxford or Cambridge. It only took one summer to change her mind. When Fairn was 15, her mother secretly signed her up for a youth program at the National Youth Theatre in Liverpool. “I didn’t really want to go,” she says, “but being around loads of other young people who loved acting was the best thing ever. I wanted to do it for the rest of my life.”
That program led Fairn to Guildhall, but it was some time before Guildhall led her to a proper acting job. When the pandemic sent everyone packing in the spring of her final year, Fairn returned to Liverpool. As soon as coronavirus restrictions were lifted, she moved back to London and took a job at a vintage stall on Brick Lane. Her best friend, Callie, whom she’d met on her first day at the National Youth Theatre, worked in the stall next door. In the evenings, the pair would return to their “horrible, disgusting” apartment and watch movies in each other’s beds, since they didn’t have a living room.
Some nights, Fairn worked on scripts she’d received from her agent and recorded self-taped auditions. One of those was for the police drama series The Responder, which premiered in January 2022. That first audition led to a second, and then a nail-biting chemistry read with Freeman, the show’s star. “I remember ending the Zoom being like, ‘Thank you, bye-bye,’ and just bursting out crying in my bedroom,” she says. “We’d been in and out of lockdowns, and it was the furthest I’d gotten with an audition. I thought, If I get this, my life is going to change.” Two days on, it did: she got the call confirming she’d landed the part of Casey, a young drug addict who steals a stash of cocaine.
One year and a second season of The Responder later, Fairn was cast as Alma in the West End production of Brokeback Mountain, starring alongside Lucas Hedges and Mike Faist. One performance proved particularly serendipitous: that morning, Hedges had run into Reitman, with whom he’d worked on Labor Day in 2013, and invited him to see the play. As soon as Fairn came onstage, Reitman knew he’d found the perfect actress to play Laraine Newman in his upcoming film, Saturday Night. It felt like kismet for Fairn, whose favorite movie growing up was Reitman’s Juno. “I had the soundtrack on vinyl, I had the burger phone … I couldn’t believe that Jason had come to see the play, let alone that I was going to be in his movie,” she says.
After getting a taste of America during the filming of Saturday Night in Atlanta, Fairn booked a role that brought her much closer to home. Though set in Dublin, House of Guinness was largely shot in Manchester and Liverpool. Filming in the summer of 2024, Fairn was delighted to show the cast around the town where she’d grown up.
Being back, eight years since her drama-school auditions, Fairn has come full circle. Well, almost: she still doesn’t have a car and can’t drive, but with everything going in her career, how could she possibly find the time to learn?
House of Guinness will be available for streaming on Netflix beginning September 25
Victoria Herman is a Junior Editor at AiR mail
