When Lucy Halliday entered the set Covenants In her first starring role — opposite Chase Infinity and in only her third acting job — she had two very strong voices in her head helping her along. The first was her personality. On Hulu The Handmaid’s Tale For the sequel, the 22-year-old plays Daisy, a Toronto teen turned secret agent at a Gilead girls’ school. “She’s a brave person, and I was constantly trying to find that in myself,” Halliday says.
The second was James McAvoy.
Halliday grew up in Paisley, Scotland, a small town outside Glasgow, where McAvoy is a true hometown hero, one of the few young celebrities that local actors can look to as an example. She has just finished work on McAvoy’s directorial debut, California chartabout two Scottish friends who reinvent themselves as a rap duo in California (the film opens April 10 in the UK and is expected to arrive in the US later this year). She says learning from him — the feedback he gave during filming, the advice he gave about character work, the way he conducted himself on set — shaped who she was as a person and an actress by the time she arrived in Toronto to play Daisy.
“throughout Covenants“If I ever felt out of my depth or unsure I’d made the right decision about something, James was there to help me. I truly believe I wouldn’t have been able to make the show without the time I spent with him,” she says.
Still, even before that CovenantsHalliday had some of Daisy’s nerves. Her parents enrolled her in youth theater at the age of eight, after she had spent so much time writing short stories and mailing them to the BBC, that one of them politely suggested that she might want to put all that energy elsewhere. “[My parents] “She was like, ‘Oh my God, we need to send her somewhere to have a creative outlet,'” she says with a laugh. She instantly connected with the way the plays allowed her to get inside a character’s head, but she says she was always against professional acting — McAvoy aside, that wasn’t the kind of career path anyone in her city had thought of — and decided to go to medical school instead. “My mom was a nurse, and I was a geek growing up,” she says. “But then once I started, I was kicking ass. Myself because I never tried to do anything related to acting.
Shortly after her first lessons, she saw an open invitation to audition for a small independent drama – and that was the end of medical school. The film was an independent film titled 2022 Blue JeanEven though she had no acting experience, had never been to an audition and did not fit the job requirements, she sent what she described as a “very disturbing” email. “They wanted someone from Newcastle, in England, who could play football really well, and I thought, ‘I’m perfect for this job.’” Halliday thought she could learn how to do a British accent and play football. She landed the part.
Its way to Covenants It was more traditional: agent, test request, Zoom callback. Aspects were vague in an attempt to keep the series under wraps — instead of Agnes and Daisy, the heroines were named Andrea and Danielle — but Halliday was a big fan of Margaret Atwood’s novels, especially her 2019 book about Covenants On the grounds that she knew immediately that she had been asked to audition for Daisy. In a recent encounter with showrunner Bruce Miller (who also ran The Handmaid’s Tale), she showcased her version of the character. “I knew I never wanted her to lose her tenacity, no matter how much she had to assimilate into Gilead,” she explains. “It was important to me because oftentimes young women feel like we have to change our identity to fit in, or shrink down, but we never lose our identity on the inside.”
Covenants It was a much larger production than she was used to. Fortunately, Infinity — who plays Agnes, John Osborn’s Gilead-raised daughter (played by Elisabeth Moss in The Handmaid’s Tale) – had just finished Paul Thomas Anderson’s big-budget drama Battle after battle. “Chase has taught me a lot about the power of standing up for yourself in a large work environment and about speaking up in general: that no place is too big for your voice.” With other young actors Mattia Conforti and Rowan Blanchard, they formed a small family of Torontonians, constantly hanging out at each other’s apartments and having weekly dinners in trendy, edgy restaurants — “I remember the Middle Ages were an important place for us” — that bolstered Halliday in the show’s more intense scenes. Nevertheless Covenants Noticeably more fun than its predecessor, and there’s still plenty of hangings and torture; During the scene where Daisy is sent to The Corrections (which is exactly what it sounds like), the girls sing evil“For goodness sake” between each take.
when Covenants Debuting on April 8, the cast will be eagerly awaiting news of the Season 2 renewal. Halliday says she would gladly do more, and she already has some ambitions beyond the show: to return to the stage, this time professionally, or perhaps play the fictional role of Merida on screen in a live-action reboot of the film. brave.
As for what comes next, she’s not particularly picky. “I love working with literally anyone,” she says with a laugh.
This story appeared in the April 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
