Emily Beecham
Emily Beecham is an actor, born 1984.
Emily Beecham won the best actress prize at Cannes in 2019 for Little Joe, playing Alice, a woman who spends most of the running time refusing to react the way the genre wants her to. The award is the clearest statement anyone has made about what she does: she specialises in withheld emotion, and she can make stillness read as integrity or as damage depending on what the film needs from her.
She was born in Manchester in 1984 and came up through British television and British horror, which is where the small parts are: a maid in Cruella, a scene in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, a role in The Street, an early role in 28 Weeks Later. None of it predicted a lead.
Into the Badlands changed that. As the Widow she was the most watchable thing in a martial arts series that was often better at fighting than at plotting. Then came Daphne, a title role in a small British film that let her be funny and self destructive in the same breath, and 1899, where she carried a Netflix mystery series more interested in its puzzle than its people.
The recent run is bigger and blander: Guy Ritchie's The Covenant, Outside the Wire, Slingshot, William Tell, and Alura In-Ze in the 2026 Supergirl.
Movies (15)
- Supergirl (2026)
- Cruella (2021)
- Guy Ritchie's The Covenant (2023)
- 28 Weeks Later (2007)
- My Mother's Wedding (2025)
- William Tell (2025)
- Outside the Wire (2021)
- Slingshot (2024)
- Rise of the Footsoldier (2007)
- Stockholm Bloodbath (2024)
- Little Joe (2019)
- Berlin, I Love You (2019)
- Daphne (2017)
- The Thirteenth Tale (2013)
- The Queen of Fashion
TV (9)
Where to start with Emily Beecham
Little Joe first, and not because of the prize. It is the film that most needs exactly what she does, a deliberately cold performance inside a story about whether feeling can be manufactured. If you find it airless, that is the design, though you are still allowed to dislike it.
Daphne is the humane counterweight and the best pure showcase she has had, a title role with real wit in it.
Into the Badlands is the fun one: as the Widow she is the reason to keep watching a show whose plotting was nobody's favourite part. 1899 is the ambitious swing, worth it for the atmosphere alone.
Around those, Cruella and Guy Ritchie's The Covenant are studio jobs that use her sparingly, and The Pursuit of Love shows how comfortable she is in period register.