Emma Corrin interview: ‘A Murder at the End of the World’
“I thought that I’d never really read anything quite like those scripts. And I’d never really seen anyone quite like Darby on the screen, especially in a murder mystery,” explains Emma Corrin about what struck them about their character in the FX on Hulu limited series “A Murder at the End of the World.” Darby is “a detective who is young, female, an amateur sleuth, very Gen Z. And not at all hardened. Not the typical detective, and I thought that was really original.” Watch our exclusive video interview with Corrin above.
Darby Hart is a tech-savvy hacker and amateur sleuth whose father was a county coroner, meaning she grew up around dead bodies. As a teenager she goes into the family business in a sense, investigating a series of unsolved murders. Years later she and several other individuals of diverse backgrounds are invited to an Icelandic retreat by a tech billionaire (Clive Owen), but when someone winds up dead she’s the one determined to get to the bottom of it.
Corrin plays Darby in both time periods, and for the younger Darby “I wanted to really give her this sort of naivete … She has a sort of joyful spirit, a very strong unbreakable spirit, and at that time isn’t quite as jaded.” The later Darby “has to get those parts of her back. She has to reembrace her faith in humanity, and she has to reembrace her vulnerability in order to solve this mystery.” But rather than make references to other famous fictional detectives, Corrin actually had anti-references: “Because [series showrunners Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij] created quite an original character, a lot of their advice was sort of like, these are the things we want you not to be.”
Of working with the creative team of Marling and Batmanglij, Corrin says, “They’re wonderful. I’ve honestly never met anyone with minds quite like theirs. They’re sort of the people you could talk to for hours on end, and also every time I’m with Brit I feel like I need a notebook to be writing down what she’s saying because it’s so beautiful.” They worked together in wide-ranging conditions, including extreme-weather location shoots in Iceland and Utah. “It’s a real lesson in galvanizing a team and feeling like you’re carrying each other through it.”
