‘I don’t mind if you get my pronouns wrong. Just try’

Emma Corrin shot to fame as Diana in ‘The Crown’ – then became non-binary. Who better to play gender-bending Orlando on stage?

O ‘rlando was a man till the age of 30; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.” So states the narrator, with notable sangfroid, in Virginia Woolf ’s extraordinary 1928 novel, Orlando. “But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.”

If Woolf ’s playful exploration of sex and identity (and pronouns) now feels like a story for our times, the role of its era-hopping, genderbending hero could have been tailor-made for Emma Corrin, who is about to take the lead in a new West End adaptation, directed by Michael Grandage. Earlier this year, 26-year-old Corrin – who emerged as one of British acting’s most exciting new talents playing a knowingly vulnerable young Princess Diana in Netflix’s royal drama The Crown – became American Vogue’s first non-binary cover star, having swapped preferred pronouns from “she/her” to “they/them” in 2021.

“Orlando’s journey celebrates the journey of identity and the shifts that happen throughout your life in terms of how you feel about yourself,” Corrin tells me, during a break in rehearsals. “That’s certainly something I’ve come to celebrate with my own journey of gender and sexuality. Orlando gives themselves permission to be constantly in a state of development. I find that really beautiful.”

By uncanny coincidence, Corrin is also about to star in the film of another groundbreaking literary classic written in the same year as Orlando, one that also grapples with questions of gender and desire: Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In Netflix’s sumptuous adaptation of DH Lawrence’s sex-and-philosophy-stuffed novel, Corrin brings an agonising radiance to the role of Constance, the unhappy uppercrust bride who embarks on a steamy love affair with her husband’s earthy gamekeeper, Mellors (Jack O’Connell). True to Lawrence’s original, the film, directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, features an awful lot of naked frolicking in the woods. Did Corrin have any qualms about playing a character defined so famously by her femininity and heterosexuality?

“I may be non-binary, but the majority of my experience on the planet has been a female one,” says Corrin, with a shake of the head. “My gender identity now is not a rejection of that, but an embrace of it. And I think Connie’s journey, whatever your sexuality or gender, speaks to a seeking of liberation, of feeling – that idea that we shouldn’t stand for anything less than to be in our bodies, and to be allowed to feel sexually and to be satisfied.”

Woolf ’s novel is a personal fantasy of freedom, an intensely imagined vision of the kind of life denied to the author and her lover Vita Sackville-West. Indeed, she wrote it as a quixotic alternative biography of the aristocratic Sackville-West, who liked to dress as a man. In a diary entry recounting the night they first met, Woolf notes, “I trace her passions 500 years back, and they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine.” Lawrence’s novel is similarly exploratory, toying with ideas of free will and sexual desire.

“Both central characters go on these parallel journeys of selfdiscovery,” says Corrin. “The Victorian era that came just before them was so much more oppressive than anything that preceded it, and Orlando in particular was a real ‘f--you’ to that era. Obviously, there were a lot of creative minds during that period that were ahead of their time, but both [Woolf and Lawrence] must have had a sense of something that was coming, that wasn’t quite reflected in the time that they were living in.”

Corrin was born in Kent, the eldest of three children, to Chris, a businessman, and Juliette, a speech therapist. It was, by all accounts, a happy, comfortable childhood – yet, Corrin tells me, “I was always escaping through stories, writing, forcing anyone who was my friend to be in plays I wrote. I always had my head in the clouds.” Is it possible that Corrin was already aware, on some unarticulated level, of needing to escape from an assigned gender?

“Maybe, or maybe it was just the experience of being a child and trying to figure the world out. It felt much easier to live in different ones.”

Corrin studied English with Education and Drama at Cambridge after dropping out of a degree at Bristol, and then, with dizzying speed, landed the role of Diana in The Crown, almost by accident – cast after helping out with a “chemistry” reading in 2018 during the search for an actor to play Camilla Parker Bowles.

Corrin’s show-stealing performance as Diana, which went far deeper than head-tilting caricature, won a Golden

Globe and, virtually overnight, sealed the actor’s reputation. Not long after, Corrin appeared on the West End stage as the “fake heiress” Anna Sorokin in Joseph Charlton’s play Anna X; the actor’s newly-minted star power playfully intersecting with that character’s feted celebrity status.

No wonder Grandage, who also recently directed Corrin opposite Harry Styles in the film My Policeman, says he never considered casting anyone else as Woolf’s restlessly questing hero. “I think bringing a certain experience to the role sometimes matters,” he tells me. “It can help audiences

understand something they may not have otherwise understood.”

Would he have been prepared to cast a non-non-binary actor in the role? “Ha! The definition of acting is that you find things beyond your own experience. I’d never argue that one approach is either right or wrong. But I will say this: on screen, Emma has the sort of luminosity that can convey an entire scene in a single glance. But more importantly for me, on stage, they have this wonderful appreciation of language that sets them apart from most actors of their generation.”

When we speak, Corrin is freshfaced and make-up free: “I spent eight years at a wonderful all-girls boarding school [Woldingham, in Surrey], where no one bothered to wear cosmetics or brush their hair, or cared what they looked like,” Corrin tells me. “Whenever I’m in glam, I feel very out of place and strange. I love dressing up – but I still have a hard time wanting to put on make-up.”

This might sound like a contrary stance for an actor, but Corrin enjoys subverting convention, not least on the red carpet, whether sporting a balloon bra over a dress at the Olivier Awards, or turning up at the Met Gala in a top hat and razor-sharp lapels. “The louder and sillier the fashion is, the more it feels like fun,” says Corrin. “Pushing those boundaries through clothing feels connected to something very real within me.”

Yet, paradoxically, Corrin admits to sometimes feeling uneasy about being looked at. “I think I find certain sorts of gazes difficult. But the people who might be looking at me in that way probably wouldn’t make any distinction about my gender. If you want to be an actor, you have to make your peace with the fact you are going to be looked at and people will make their own judgments.”

Acting, which by definition requires performers to try on multiple identities, seems to chime with Corrin on a deep molecular level, as well as a vocational one.

“Stepping into other people’s shoes makes your mind more prone to different states of being. You see identity as something more multifaceted and less fixed. Obviously, Shakespeare tapped into this all the time, in the way he wrote roles in which men would be playing women dressed up as men. And I think audiences have, unbeknownst to themselves, perhaps, sometimes been more accepting of these things in the theatre than they have in real life.”

Was Corrin ever anxious that coming out as non-binary might have a career-limiting effect? “I’m definitely fortunate that I’m dealing with this now and not 10 years ago. I know a lot of gay actors who took a long time to come out because they were worried about that, but I didn’t think about it. It was important to me to live authentically – otherwise you run into a whole host of problems.”

For Corrin, living authentically is more about personal shifts, rather than big symbolic gestures. When they were nominated in last year’s WhatsOnStage Awards for Anna X, the Best Actress category was renamed Best Performer in a Female Identifying Role. When I suggest it’s time for the Oscars to follow suit, Corrin agrees enthusiastically, but admits: “In the absence of those changes, it would be fine if I were nominated as Best Actress in a female role! What would be a problem is for a nonbinary actor playing a non-binary role to be up for Best Actress.”

Corrin is equally forgiving when it comes to pronouns. “I don’t mind if people get my pronouns wrong, that’s fine,” they say. “Just try, and I’ll correct you where necessary and gradually we take steps forward. It’s not going to happen overnight.”

Next up for Corrin, after Orlando’s three-month West End run, is the lead in Retreat, a postmodern murder-mystery TV series from Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, creators of sci-fi drama The OA. “Those guys are incredibly ahead of their time. I love the way they push storytelling out of its comfort zone.” Beyond that, Corrin is coy about any future ambitions. “I like to be surprised by stuff, see what resonates. But I would like to play a villain. It’s about time I explored some darkness.”

‘When I’m in glam, I feel out of place and strange. I have a hard time with make-up’

‘Orlando’ is at the Garrick Theatre, London WC2 (garricktheatre.co.uk) from Dec 5. ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, in cinemas now, is on Netflix on Fri