In person, Aisling Franciosi couldn’t be more funny and charming. On screen, she’s a very different entity. The Dublin-born actor has, since her earliest roles, brought a fierce energy, both emotional and physical, to traumatic material.
From the historical brutality of Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale to the dark, Dracula-inspired tensions of The Last Voyage of the Demeter, her work has consistently excavated the extremities of human experience.
In her new film, James Sweeney’s Sundance rave Twinless, Franciosi occupies a different register, adding warmth and understated comedic flair to Marcie, an affable secretary whose lightness serves as a counterpoint to the grief and cynicism around her.
For Franciosi, Twinless was an unexpected and pleasing departure from the grim roles for which she has become known.
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“I remember reading it very clearly,” she says. “I was actually skiing when I was sent the script, and I had to let them know pretty quickly whether I wanted to meet for it or not. So I’d ski down as fast as I could, stop, read a bit more, then ski again.
“I did the worst skiing of my life, genuinely, because I was so distracted trying to get through this amazing script.”
Twinless deserves its early acclaim. The film’s director and writer plays Dennis, a self-conscious, tart-tongued gay man who falls in with Roman (the charismatic Dylan O’Brien), an angry, straight loner, at a bereavement group for people who have lost a twin. Together they form an odd but firm friendship.
Franciosi is on top form as Marcie, a workmate of Dennis whose optimism and emotional openness constantly unsettle him. When an attraction develops between her and Roman, Dennis becomes increasingly involved in – and threatened by – their relationship. And that’s all before Marcie rumbles Dennis’s terrible secret.
“At first Marcie might not seem like the brightest person in the room,” Franciosi says. “But then she surprises you. She’s not just the dumb love interest, and James was very conscious of that.”
As Franciosi notes, it’s vanishingly unlikely that Sweeney watched the violent rape-revenge cycle of The Nightingale and thought, she’d be perfect for Twinless.
“Fair play to James, because he really had nothing to go on,” she says. “It was a really lovely and unexpected surprise to even be considered for it. I’d never been asked to do comedy before, so I needed that reassurance myself. I wanted to feel confident going into it, not like I was blagging my way through something people assumed I couldn’t do.”
Working opposite Sweeney was a revelation. Shifting between both sides of the camera, the film-maker and his star fashioned a collaborative experience.
“I honestly don’t know how James did it,” she says. “He was wearing so many hats, and I don’t know how I’d even begin to organise my brain like that. But from my side I really loved it. I love working with writer-directors because there’s such clarity. There’s no missing step in communication. They wrote the thing. They know exactly what they need.”
For The Nightingale, her international breakthrough, from 2018, Franciosi prepared for more than nine months, researching colonial horrors, sexual violence and mental trauma. Kent’s follow-up to The Babadook is set in 1825 on the British penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania).
The film studies Franciosi’s young Irish convict as, following an act of appalling violence against her and her family, she takes brutal revenge on the occupying British forces. Franciosi worked with a clinical psychologist and met survivors and social workers. A psychologist was on set for especially taxing scenes.
“The material was obviously sensitive and very difficult,” Franciosi says. “By the time it went out into the world I was strangely at peace with it. Because it had literally everything from me. It was blood, sweat and tears. Even though I was so drained at the end of it, I knew I couldn’t have done anything more. I couldn’t have done anything differently. I gave it everything.”
Born in Dublin in 1993, Franciosi is the daughter of an Irish mother, from Meath, and an Italian father, from Milan, a heart surgeon. She spent her early years, before her parents’ divorce, in Italy; then Franciosi and her siblings returned to Dublin with their mother. Italy remained a frequent holiday destination, and she continues to visit her dad in Milan.
Franciosi’s linguistic duality as a native speaker of both English and Italian (on top of which she also studied French and Spanish at Trinity College Dublin) has informed both her performance style and her sense of identity.
“Language changes you physically,” she says. “When I speak Italian I move differently. I use hand gestures. I have friends who say I’m a different person speaking Italian. The cultures aren’t wildly different, but the subtleties matter. There are words in Italian that just encapsulate something perfectly, so I’ll use them with my mum, because English doesn’t quite get there.”
Franciosi went to her first drama class at the age of six. There was no turning back.
“I was always a bit of a goody two-shoes,” she says. “I was very well behaved. I always had a sensible head on my shoulders. I loved the idea of, ‘Oh, wait, when you do this you can say and do things that you would never do in real life.’
“That’s stayed with me. I definitely play a lot of characters who are stuck in negative emotions. It’s so cathartic to play someone who is screaming into the void or having a breakdown.”
Franciosi’s screen career began with smaller parts, including a portrayal of a young Lyanna Stark in Game of Thrones, and a well-regarded stint in the RTÉ-BBC crime drama The Fall, in which she played Katie Benedetto, from 2013 to 2016. She subsequently appeared in the TNT series Legends and made her big-screen debut in the Ken Loach film Jimmy’s Hall.
“I had done one job as an extra before The Fall,” she says. “And then I was on set with Ken Loach. I’ve definitely been spoiled. And then The Nightingale. It’s difficult not to compare any other kind of role after that. That’s something I’ve been working on the last few years. I think I had notions. That every role had to matter. And now I think it’s okay to do something that’s just fun and entertaining.”
That doesn’t mean she’s hoping to break into franchises any time soon. The film section of her CV is still characterised by meatier fare: a survivor of sexual assault in God’s Creatures, an animator struggling to complete a film after the death of her domineering mother in Stopmotion, part of a sinister folie a deux alongside James McEvoy’s predator in Speak No Evil.
“Independent cinema is where my heart is, but it gets trampled on constantly,” Franciosi says. “Honestly, any independent film that gets made now feels like a miracle. Independent films are where you find the strangest, most specific stories, and that’s why I love acting.
“I do hope there’s a shift away from constant spectacle and towards more human-scale stories. When I’m watching an independent film, that’s when I’m most engaged. When I’m watching a superhero film I’ll just be thinking about technical stuff – like, ‘That rain machine is turned up really high.’”
In common with the Oscar hopeful Jessie Buckley, Franciosi remains discreet about her home life. As we meet, she is pregnant and plans to take some time away from work. She has got better at downtime, she says.
“You have so little control in this industry, no matter how hard you try or how carefully you plan. I’ve had to loosen my grip on what I thought my career should look like. I’m pretty good at keeping myself busy. I don’t like sitting around. I always give myself a project to do. I’m happy in my own company as well.
“I used to think ‘I’m never going to work again’ between jobs. Now I realise that at some point I will work again. There are times when acting is frustrating. Things fall apart all the time.”
Franciosi seems to have endured those vicissitudes with aplomb.
“I’m incredibly lucky,” she says “I’m doing exactly what I dreamed of doing when I was a kid.”
Twinless is in cinemas from Friday, February 6th
