Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for the short film, The Talent.
Summary
- The Talent explores ambition in the entertainment industry with deep desires and complex masculinity.
- Emma D'Arcy discusses the challenges of playing their first transmasculine character and gender in media with Collider in an exclusive interview.
- D'Arcy hints at dark potential within The Talent, leaving viewers to ponder a sinister ending.
Best known for their role as Rhaenyra Targaryen in House of the Dragon, actor Emma D'Arcy is taking on a new role as Tommy in their short film The Talent, written and directed by Thomas May Bailey. D'Arcy plays Tommy, a shy and soft-spoken production assistant who is working on the set of a high-end car commercial. Opposite them is Leo Suter's David, an illustrious movie star at the center of the commercial. While David films his parts for the commercial, Tommy fantasizes about a successful future with David at his side as a co-star, retelling the story of how they first met on this set. Sleek and cutting, The Talent takes a deep look at ambition within the entertainment industry while also examining themes of complex masculinity and a deep, wanting desire. You can feel Tommy's yearning as he watches David through the camera lens, and you daydream alongside him about a future that feels both unattainable and infinitely possible.
D'Arcy sat down to talk with Collider about their experience working on The Talent. D'Arcy not only plays Tommy but also acts as a co-producer alongside Ellen Spence and helped Bailey develop the project. Alongside playing Tommy as their first transmasculine character, D'Arcy discusses playing trans characters and gender in the media. They also speak about the short, their character's motivations, and the potential of where the story might go in the future.
What Is 'The Talent' About?
The Talent takes you on quite a few twists and turns throughout its 15-minute runtime. What starts as another day on set, with Tommy working as a PA on the set of a luxury car commercial, slowly goes awry. Tommy sits at the lowest rung of the ladder on set, if he isn't being ignored, he's being misgendered. When David arrives, the energy is pulled toward him immediately, and you can see Tommy reacting instantly to his presence. Intercut between Tommy's quiet fascination with David is moments of Tommy, years later, sitting on an interview couch with a host on TV. In these scenes, he's dressed up in a suit, he's confident and casual, laughing about his first interaction with David, who is brought out and jokes with Tommy about his brashness that first day they met. The short lures you into a false sense of security. Even as you are cringing for our Tommy, you know that at the end of it all, he makes it. He ends up on that couch like a star, and that makes this all worth it. Except that's not what happens at all. The Talent takes a sharp turn as the reality of what is happening to Tommy clashes with what we see. By the end of the film, an ambiguousness leaves us wondering and even worrying about what will happen to Tommy after all of this.
The Idea of Ambition and Advertisement Played a Large Role in the Inception of 'The Talent'
"The language of those promises becomes a really interesting thing to look at."
Before The Talent, Emma D'Arcy already had a history of collaborating with director Thomas May Bailey, primarily in producing theater together, before starting a production company called Second Name Productions. "That was sort of my entry point into the industry more broadly, like very small scale. We ran a little fringe company in London and Edinburgh and the UK," they explain before clarifying that after that, the duo took a hiatus before reviving their collaboration with The Talent, which allowed them to explore a completely new medium together.
As a producer and actor, D'Arcy discussed the advantages of such a role, saying, "I like being involved from the inception all the way through to delivery. Part of my interest is in the dramaturgy and the construction of the thing. So, Thomas wrote the script, and then I developed it with him. Then, I co-produced this with another producer called Ellen Spence, and it was a big education because in a theater context, I know the ropes, I know what's required, I know how to make things happen, and I know the workflow, whereas this is a very different process."
When it came to the actual story, D'Arcy says that for both Bailey and themselves, there was a desire to deliver an emotional hit even in a short span of time, like during a short film. They emphasized that the setting of the short film being on a commercial set helped them to lean into the themes of the film. "I've been interested in advertising for a long time; I sort of think a lot about that mechanism, about this tool, which can be the co-option of ambition. I think that conflation becomes particularly acute when you have celebrity endorsement, right? And I think one of the mechanisms of advertising is to take the love that one has for oneself in the present and promise to gift it back in the future if you buy X product if you buy into X idea. So that part of the work was something that Thomas and I spent a lot of time drawing out and thinking particularly about the sort of vacuousness of that sales language, especially in a contemporary context where I know that my generation was promised a lot, and we're one of the first generations who are broadly expected to be poorer than our parents. And so, the language of those promises becomes, I think, a really interesting thing to look at."
Gender Plays a Larger Role in Tommy's Persona Than You'd Think
"I guess the thing that excites me in terms of storytelling is being able to include trans characters in stories that are not necessarily about the trans plight."
For D'Arcy, Tommy is their first transgender role, and once it was decided that they would play the character, his gender identity became a large but subtle part of the character. D'arcy says, "As a transmasculine person myself, I think something that we pulled out once it was decided that I would play Tommy is thinking about masculinity in this context is super interesting. Tommy's desire and interest, as far as his obsession with David goes, is multifaceted. I think he sort of wants to be him, he wants to have him — I think he also wants to sort of be adopted by him. It’s something that feels very resonant to me, certainly, is craving this sort of adoption by older men as role models in masculinity [is] a type of attention that I see cis men get from older male peers a lot. I think part of what Tommy is looking for is to have his masculinity reflected back at him, and that feels like a complicated territory."
D'Arcy is no stranger to discussing gender, especially in the media and press. However, they clarify that "the thing that excites me in terms of storytelling is being able to include trans characters in stories that are not necessarily about the trans plight. Those stories are also really important, but the thing that feels progressive to me is having diversity within the production team and within the cast broadly without having to explain what those people are. For me, playing Tommy, it was super exciting to get to think about and spend time with a part of my own presentation that often gets shelved when I go to work."
Discussing the complexity of the set environment in the film and the different hierarchies and power dynamics at play, D'Arcy mentions that the space is hard to navigate as a newcomer, especially finding "your place within a pecking order that no one's introduced you to." Injecting some of their own personality and experience into it, they note that it's not an environment where it's easy to ask for things and "part of what we see in Tommy is constantly navigating stuff to do with pronouns, to do with presentation in an environment that can be very impersonal." Tommy, who is very low on the totem pole of people on set, becomes alienated from many of the conversations and decisions being made on set. "He has a very, very loud interior monologue, which, when you're in a position of low status, I think sometimes your subjective voice gets turned up because you're not in dialogue with other people so much," D'Arcy explains.
Emma D'Arcy on Challenging Themselves and Their Identity
"I end up speaking about gender loads — that isn't because I'm endlessly fascinated by gender."
D'Arcy, who calls theater their "little home place," starred in two plays this year alongside the release of The Talent, which was a finalist at the Manhattan Short Festival and a nominee at BIFA Best British Short Festival. In Bluets, they acted alongside Kayla Meikle and Ben Wishaw at the Royal Court Theater in a play based on Maggie Nelson's book of the same name. In The Other Place, they acted alongside Alison Oliver, Tobias Menzies, and Nina Sosanya in a play about the character of Antigone. When discussing with them about their play and what their ideal role would be, once again they honed in on gender and the inherent baggage that comes with casting. "There are types of directors and types of work that I'm interested in. I mean, it's a hard thing, isn't it? Because famously, there are many, many, many amazing plays, and a lot of those amazing parts are for men. We're in an age where people cast in all sorts of ways, and something being sold on the idea that it's like, 'Oh my god, so-and-so…' I don't know, I find a stickiness around casting, I guess. It's ironic, right? I end up speaking about gender loads — that isn't because I'm endlessly fascinated by gender. You know? It's funny."
In D'Arcy's case, though, they enjoy a challenge when it comes to the roles they take. "The thing I'm thinking about a lot at the moment is I really enjoy not knowing if something is honestly beyond my capability, whether that's just a type of character or a skill set that I don't yet have. I think so much of my job, or some of the best elements of my job, are about being invited to try to understand different ways of seeing the world. So, characters that actually, in some way, threaten elements of my own identity are interesting to me because I feel that we live in an extremely polarized time, and I don't know how we're supposed to make progress without really flexing our empathy wherever possible. And so, I guess that's what I'm drawn to at the moment are characters who I find scary in some way, and kind of personally scary. My hope would be that they force me to develop greater capacity and greater understanding."
But, then when it all comes down to it, they manage to satisfy my curiosity when they confess with a laugh, "My cheap answer is that I'd really like to play Hamlet at some point." And after seeing their portrayal of Tommy, with his wide-eyed ambition and depth of character, not to mention their layered performance as Rhaenyra Targaryen — another royal usurped by a dastardly family member — it's hard to imagine a person better fit for the role of the prince of Denmark than D'Arcy.
D'Arcy Discusses the Dark Potential of 'The Talent'
"I think there's something definitely sinister about that closing."
However, before they can take to the stage again as Hamlet (or anyone else), The Talent still has plenty more potential for storytelling. When Tommy gets lost in his own future success story, we are also pulled into that trap alongside him and begin to imagine a whole new life that might never become a reality. D'Arcy notes, "We're interested in the idea of overnight success, and in a way, this is all like the ambition machine. This is Stardom Factory stuff. And, yeah, Tommy just follows the trail of breadcrumbs a little wrong." And while they mention that there is a level of hope in the ending, it was difficult for me not to notice that there was an air of something sinister in the final shot of Tommy driving away from set after a disastrous conversation with David. Curious about the potential of a more extended story, I prodded D'Arcy for their take on the final scenes.
"I definitely think there's darkness in the ending. I mean, I suppose my taste is that there's a dark humor in the way that the film resolves or doesn't resolve. But I like that Tommy’s revelatory experience in the course of one day — the film is set in one location in one day — and the scale of his experiences is sort of at odds with the environment. For everyone else, it's one day at work, and he's having a transformative revelation about identity and the future. So, I like that I think there's a dark humor and ending in the short ending, almost like the advert. You're not entirely sure what horizon he's headed for, but there's definitely appetite in it," they explain, before assuring that I was right in my instincts on the final shots. "But no, I totally agree with you. I think there's something definitely sinister about that closing." Whether we'll get more of Tommy's story is still yet to be determined, but what's for sure after watching D'Arcy play the enigmatic Tommy, they have the potential for far more than what we've seen them in so far, and that is an exciting prospect.
The Talent is currently unavailable to stream anywhere online. However, you can get a behind-the-scenes look at the filming on Vimeo.
