History Girl

Aisling Franciosi stars in Jennifer Kent’s astonishing sophomore feature, a period piece with the immediacy of a thriller.

- Francesca Mari

TALENT

Aisling Franciosi doesn’t look like the type to keep a journal, an activity often associated with introverted adolescents. But sitting across from me at a downtown New York restaurant, sleek and composed in a white T-shirt and black pants, the 28-year-old Irish-Italian actor insists she is. Aisling (pronounced ASH-ling) keeps a work journal, a chronicle of her roles and auditions. “If I’m feeling anxious,” Franciosi tells me, “it’s good to look back and realize that this is just one of the troughs.” She likes to keep the journal unemotional, but there are exceptions. The day Britain woke up to the news that Brexit had passed, she got a call offering her the lead in Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (the director’s follow-up to the highly acclaimed Babadook). She granted that news an entire, exuberant page.

In The Nightingale, out this month, Franciosi plays Clare, a 21-year-old Irish convict indentured to a British lieutenant in Tasmania in the 1820s. Rendering this brutal period of the country’s history means rendering the countless victims of the colonial project, and the film does this relentlessly. “You should feel something if you see it,” Franciosi says. The Nightingale is a movie about cyclical trauma, and Clare is the wheel that rolls through it all, Franciosi’s virtuosic performance hitting every emotional note: tenderness, terror, resolve, resentment, and rage.