In Netflix’s global phenomenon Wednesday, Emma Myers plays Enid Sinclair, the werewolf roommate of Jenna Ortega’s titular teen. With her rainbow wardrobe and garrulous disposition, Enid is the colourful, cheerful counterpoint to Wednesday Addams’ deadpan monochrome. However, via Zoom from her accommodation in Dublin where she’s busy filming season two of the show, unlike the loquacious lupine role that made her name, Myers is having to keep schtum about what’s in store.
“I cannot tell you anything about Wednesday season two!,” the 22-year-old star apologises to NME. “Otherwise my body will be buried somewhere and you’ll never see me again.” An ability for tight-lipped restraint isn’t the only difference between Myers and Enid. Today, she’s wearing all black with a chestnut bob, as opposed to Enid’s dip-dyed blonde.
Fortunately, if anyone is murdered by shadowy Netflix execs for spilling any tea, Myers’ next role (and the one we’re here to talk about) might equip her to solve the case, as she steps out of Wednesday’s goth-shadow to lead the hotly-anticipated BBC Three adaptation of author Holly Jackson’s mega-hit young adult whodunnit A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.
She stars as overachieving straight-A student Pip Fitz-Amobi who opts, for her end-of-sixth-form project, to investigate the murder of a former student at her school five years ago. In the fictional middle-class town of Little Kilton, schoolgirl Andie Bell went missing. Her boyfriend, Sal Singh, sent a text confession before being found dead, apparently taking his own life. But Pip isn’t convinced and teams up with Sal’s younger brother Ravi (newcomer Zain Iqbal) to prove his innocence, as twists and turns abound.
“It keeps you on your toes the whole time,” praises Myers. “I remember feeling stressed reading the series of books. My heart was racing and Holly Jackson’s really good at leaving you on cliffhangers and thinking you have it figured out but you actually don’t, and the adaptation keeps the same suspense the whole way through.”
Myers, who fleetingly toyed with the ambition of becoming a FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) profiler when she was younger, felt an affinity to Pip. “I felt like I have more in common with Pip than I do Enid,” she says. “I’m not as smart as Pip is, but our personalities are somewhat similar, so I felt a connection with her when I read the books.”
After landing the part, Myers relocated to Somerset during summer 2023, with two weeks’ preparation and a dialect coach to nail down the cut-glass British accent the Orlando, Florida-born actor uses to portray Pip. She didn’t base the voice on anybody. “In the UK, accents are so specific and you drive half an hour and have a whole new accent, so I didn’t want to pick someone in case I got the accent wrong,” she remembers. Having only visited London and Liverpool before, she relished the opportunity to explore other areas of the UK (“I’m a big Jane Austen fan so I wanted to go around Bath and see the little villages”) and admits to having picked up some British phrases from her castmates including “Good shout!” (“I love saying that now”). During downtime from filming, she and her sister would binge Murder, She Wrote marathons on 5SELECT – which is fitting as A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder could be a Gen Z descendent of the quaint ‘80s/’90s Angela Lansbury-helmed mystery series, a kind of Murder, She ‘Grammed. “I think if Mrs [Jessica] Fletcher and Pip teamed up, they would make a pretty good team!”, says Myers, which is a multiverse franchise NME would like to see.
Tonally, it feels like the chocolate-box village world of Midsomer Murders mashed up with Skins, or – as lead writer and executive producer Poppy Cogan describes the show – a collision of Booksmart, Veronica Mars and the true-crime podcast Serial. Beginning in 2019, Jackson’s novels were a smash-hit (last year, she sold more books than any other YA author, as well as being the top-selling female author of crime fiction in the UK), with a devoted fanbase forged via #BookTok, but Myers isn’t feeling any pressure to live up to their expectations. “I feel like I’ve got the hang of passionate fanbases now, so it won’t be as crazy this time for me,” she says.
“My mum sat me down and said: ‘You do understand this is life-changing, right?'”
This is good news. When Wednesday – Tim Burton’s supernatural coming-of-age reimagining of The Addams Family for a new generation – dropped in November 2022, it swiftly became the platform’s second most-watched English-language series of all-time and a global pop culture behemoth that turned Ortega into a (Cousin) It Girl. Fans, including Lady Gaga and Kim Kardashian, rushed to TikTok to recreate the show’s viral choreography to The Cramps’ 1981 song ‘Goo Goo Muck’. There are Enid Funko POP! figures. To a certain degree, Myers was insulated from the frenzy.
“The day after the show came out, I started filming a movie and so I wasn’t paying attention to how much it blew up,” she says. Her first indication was when she gained 10million Instagram followers within three weeks, but it fully hit when she returned home to Atlanta in Christmas that year. “My mum sat me down and said: ‘You do understand this is life-changing, right? This is huge. You can’t go out without washing your hair and dressing nice again’. That was a big change because I grew up home-schooled, and not doing anything of this size until all of a sudden, you’re thrown into the public eye. It was such a big overnight change that I didn’t even want to think about it. I avoided Instagram – I felt sick every time I posted something because of how fast people reacted to it.”
Her idols started privately messaging her to say how much they enjoyed the series (“Suddenly you’re getting Instagram notifications from people you had posters of”), including K-Pop boyband SEVENTEEN, whom she’d loved since she was 15. “I called my sister who said ‘You’re lying to me right now!’, and I had to send her screenshots to prove I was not lying ‘cause it was such a big thing for us. They’re sweet guys.”
Born in 2002, Myers developed a passion for TV and film by watching behind-the-scenes vlogs of blockbusters like The Lord of the Rings, and had a career as a child actor doing theatre and commercial work. When her family relocated to Atlanta, things progressed, with small parts in the likes of A&E crime drama The Glades, but Wednesday has put the nitro in the afterburners of her career for an impressive run: there was a leading role in the 2023 Freaky Friday-esque body-swap comedy Family Switch, where she got to act opposite Jennifer Garner and sing with Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, and a clandestine part in the long-awaited Minecraft movie, slated for release next April – another project with a fervent following.
“That was a strange but amazing experience,” she recalls. “We were filming in New Zealand which had been a bucket-list destination of mine since I was little, so I was very happy. I got to work with Jack Black – a childhood hero right there. He’s such a fantastic, funny guy, and Jason Momoa was hilarious.”
The ardent #BookTok following of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder means that fans regularly ‘ship the relationship between amateur-detective duo Pip and Ravi (their relationship has been slightly altered for the TV version), but Myers is no stranger to that since ‘Wenclair’ shippers have been vocally jockeying for the characters of Wednesday and Enid to get together romantically. Keenly attuned to online fan culture, she says the reaction is something she and Ortega joked about on set while filming season one.
“Ship who you want as long as you’re not dragging real-life people into it”
“I’ve grown up as a big fan of things, so I know how the ‘shipping goes online, so I understand,” she reflects. “‘Ship who you want as long as you’re not dragging real-life people into it. If you want to ‘ship those characters, go for it. We made a couple of jokes about it here and there when filming, but we didn’t think that side of the fandom would be so big and intense. But it’s all in good fun.”
Which brings us to probing again, channelling the investigative-bloodhound nous of Pip Fitz-Amobi, for any hints as to the forthcoming sophomore season of Wednesday, where Billie Piper and Steve Buscemi are joining the fantastical fray. “I’ve gotten to work with Steve Buscemi – he’s absolutely fantastic,” she praises of the new additions. “And Billie Piper a couple of times, and we’re getting into the swing of it, and everybody fits in really well. This season’s going to be great, especially with the new cast, and I’m excited about it.” Before a Thing-style hand appears to drag her off, she skilfully pivots to the fact she enjoys working with veteran actors who can give her advice. “When I worked with Jennifer Garner [on Family Switch], I was constantly asking her: ‘How do you do this? How do you deal with this? What do you do when this happens?’, and she had so much good advice.”
With three books in the A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder canon and Jackson raving of Myers’ central-turn “She more than knocks it out of the park. She knocks it out of the Milky Way”, the door is open for more in the future, and her Wednesday castmates are thrilled to see her step into the normie-sleuthing spotlight. “They wanted to do a watch-party for it,” says Myers, who on this occasion would prefer to remain a lone wolf. “But I can’t watch myself with everybody, so they’ll have to watch it separately.”
‘A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder’ launches on BBC iPlayer on July 1