Admiration Society brings together two creative people from two different fields for one wide-ranging conversation.
Emma Corrin first encountered Maggie Nelson’s work three summers ago, when the actor was in Brighton, England, filming 2022’s “My Policeman,” a British drama about postwar sexual repression. At the time, Corrin, now 28, was grappling with their gender identity, and a friend recommended “The Argonauts” (2015), Nelson’s memoir about queer desire and making a family with her partner, the artist Harry Dodge. The book appealed so deeply to Corrin that, when that production ended, they decided to remain at the flat they’d rented during filming to finish reading it.
Nelson, 51, was born in Northern California and moved in the 1990s to New York, where she worked as a waitress, trained as a dancer and took workshops with the poet Eileen Myles before getting her Ph.D. in English at the City University of New York. In addition to “The Argonauts,” Nelson, who’s now based in Los Angeles, is the author of “Bluets” (2009), a meditation on love and loss in the form of a treatise on the color blue; “Like Love” (2024), her latest collection of essays and conversations; and eight other books that include scholarly criticism, autobiography, true crime and poetry.
Corrin’s career has also spanned genres. After earning a degree in education, English and drama at the University of Cambridge, the London-based actor gained sudden acclaim as Princess Diana on “The Crown” in 2020, and then went on to star in the historical romance “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (2022), the psychological thriller “A Murder at the End of the World” (2023) and in the 2022 stage adaptation of “Orlando: A Biography,” Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel. Once billed as an ingénue, Corrin brings a fierce physicality to their roles, the next of which will be in Robert Eggers’s gothic horror film “Nosferatu,” an update of the vampire classic that will be released next month.
For Corrin, who recently wrote a screenplay with a friend, Nelson’s work remains a touchstone. After wrapping “A Murder at the End of the World,” the co-creator Zal Batmanglij presented the actor with a copy of “The Red Parts,” Nelson’s 2007 memoir of following a murder trial. Earlier this year, Corrin saw the playwright Margaret Perry’s adaptation of “Bluets,” starring Emma D’Arcy, Kayla Meikle and Ben Whishaw, in London. It was the first time that Nelson’s work had been performed onstage.
This past summer, Corrin, who was in Los Angeles to promote their turn in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” met Nelson for the first time in a Hollywood photography studio, where the actor and the writer discussed vulnerability, the dangers of self-editing for social media and the pleasure of bringing a sense of play to their work.
Emma Corrin: Recently I went to see “Bluets” at the Royal Court Theatre. I’ve loved [the director] Katie Mitchell’s work for so long. And I talk about Ben Whishaw in every interview I do. It’s embarrassing, but he’s one of the reasons I wanted to become an actor. His characters are so strong, but that strength is found through vulnerability. He was the first person I saw where I thought, “Oh, maybe I could do this.”
T: Did you study acting at university?
E.C.: No, I always wanted to act, but I didn’t get into drama school — I tried many times. I wouldn’t say I’m superacademic. I never thought I’d apply to anywhere like Oxford or Cambridge, but I had an amazing mentor [in secondary school] who said, “There’s this [degree] at Cambridge called Education, English, Drama and the Arts that a lot of people do who want to go into theater. Why don’t you apply?” It was the best three years of my life. And incidentally, I really enjoyed studying education and the theories of teaching children.
The industry seemed like such a far-off place then. Did you feel similarly when you were starting out — that nothing was for certain?
Maggie Nelson: I’d come up in a very small do-it-yourself, post-punk, kind of queer milieu where mainstream accolades were not the thing —
E.C.: The thing you were [aiming] for.
M.N.: [Getting published in] The New Yorker or in the trade presses wasn’t a badge of honor per se. There were people who demonstrated the kind of career that I wanted. Eileen [Myles] in particular was like, “Don’t write a bad book.” When I think about my 20s, I think of the phrase “an age of striving” … and not even knowing [what we were] striving toward.
People, especially young women, will sometimes ask me questions about confidence, and I don’t mean this to sound cocky, but that was not the question [I struggled with]. The question was not self-doubt. It was more like, “Where are you reading tonight?” or “What are you reading now?” It was a constant output into the world. And it was fun. Some of the fun is [in having only] the eyes of your peers on you. With more eyes, there’s more work to do.
E.C.: I’m really aware of that now. Who you create for and what drives you to create changes if what you’re doing becomes public property — even if that’s not your intention.
M.N.: It’s a strange thing: You have to feel alone when you’re writing in order to go into a place [of emotional honesty], but that’s very different from publishing. Now that I’m on the other side of 50, it’s like, “Who cares?” I wonder how it is with choosing parts.
E.C.: I’m discovering that I miss and crave the solitude I used to have because [acting] is very collaborative. In a rehearsal room, you have this communal energy — you feed [off] each other. Increasingly I’m trying to find areas where I can have solitude.
I was always writing as a kid, and I remember the joy of not doing it for anyone but me. Now I’ve spent so long in this cycle of having to simultaneously create something in your brain that feels true and authentic while also always worrying about the perception of what you’re saying and how it’s going to be used.
M.N.: That’s hard because you’re speaking through the press. Whereas when you’re speaking through a book, you represent yourself. There’re a million terrible articles [about which I think], “That’s crazy, and I didn’t say that or mean that.” But the book remains the book.
E.C.: Anytime I sit down, I constantly think about how [my writing] is going to be read. Do you do the same?
M.N.: No, because I know how long it takes to make a book project. There’s a kind of sleight of hand: I’m very vulnerable in the process and then, by the time it’s out there and people are asking, “How could you bare your soul?,” I’m not there anymore. It’s a little bit of a bait and switch. It’s like, “I have no feelings about that.” Actually, watching “Bluets,” the play, was really weird.
E.C.: Because you were faced with a part of your life that you hadn’t thought about for a while?
M.N.: Because the book is the thing I’m comfortable with. If I’d written something that I really didn’t think should be in the world, I’d find a way to make peace with it. I wrote a book called “On Freedom” that came out in 2021, and I let rip a lot of opinions while writing and then had to ask myself, “What do I think? What do I really want to say?” I’m accustomed to [the idea that] you have to go into the writing room —
E.C.: And let rip.
M.N.: I’m always telling [my students], “Your mom may not end up being in this book. Whatever you think this is about, you just don’t know.”
T: Maggie, you have a background in dance. Did you come to performance before writing?
M.N.: I was writing all along, but dance was always the more playful thing. I remember on Monday nights at P.S. 122 [an East Village performance space founded in 1980], there was contact improv. I never missed it. That was very formative.
E.C.: Do you feel like you can play in your writing, too?
M.N.: I felt more playful in my youth. Now writing feels very pleasurable in terms of puzzle solving.
E.C.: A brain exercise.
M.N.: Yes, it’s play, but I just don’t know that it’s lighthearted. I’m summoning a sense of realness that’s actually been very cooked; I’m sure that the words are right. [Literature conjures] a weird phantom of immediacy. You read a book from the 1920s and you feel like Virginia Woolf is right there talking to you, but you also feel the weight of what separates you. That, to me, is the whole game.
E.C.: I find theater to be a real respite. Until the end [of a performance], you’re acting the whole way through, so you can fully dive into the experience. The vulnerability was always the hook for me. I craved a safe place where I could explore that part of myself and other people — play, in a very childlike sense of the word. I’ve always found it quite a relief.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
The post Emma Corrin and Maggie Nelson on the Strength in Vulnerability appeared first on New York Times.
