Age Of Intention

Showing up, it turns out, is something Morrone does well. Co-stars like Riley Keough have publicly praised her work ethic. She attributes it, endearingly, to anxiety – the kind that is endemic to her generation, among whom the pressure of pursuing your dreams compounds against the weight of an increasingly unstable world. Her way through it is unglamorous and relentless: groundwork. “I prepare obsessively. Script analysis, homework, studying – like I’m still in school.” The discipline was inherited, in part, from her parents, who are both actors and acutely aware of how hard it is to get a single job in this industry. “I’ve never taken any role for granted,” she says. “Being cast in a project is a privilege.”

If you haven’t heard of Camila Morrone yet, you will. She’ll soon be impossible to miss. The Argentine-American actor is about to be on every screen you own: she has just wrapped a press tour for the second season of cult espionage series The Night Manager, alongside Tom Hiddleston and Olivia Colman, is starring in her first horror with Netflix’s Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, and is filming a TV adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. It is, by any measure, a monumental year and the roles could not be more different from one another, which is precisely the point. “When I get a job opportunity, I think, ‘Is this easy for me? Could I do this with my eyes closed?’” she says. “If it is, then it’s not the right job. Unless I’m feeling like I’m growing, I’m stagnant, and I don’t want that.”

For Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, that growth meant spending five months in a psychological headspace unlike anything she had ever inhabited. “Horror is a genre that really terrified me, because you have to be a very good actor to be believable in these far-away scenarios,” she says. “You don’t have an analogy [to draw on] in your life. Everyone can relate to being in love, but I’ve never had a generational curse planted on me, thank god.” The writing, by director Haley Z. Boston, hooked her instantly. “She’s really comedic, dark, funny and witty. I wanted that and went after it.” Coming off the project, Morrone spent weeks just crying. The kind of full-body release that doesn’t make it into the press-tour highlights or the red-carpet interviews, but is as much a part of the craft. “You don’t realize how much you carry with you until a job is finished and then you have to say goodbye to it.”

Of everything on her slate, it is The Age of Innocence that stays on Morrone’s mind. She plays Countess Ellen Olenska, the black sheep who returns from Europe to the corseted constraints of New York’s 1870s Gilded Age. “Olenska is so cool because she’s a true anarchist,” Morrone says, throwing her hands in the air like it’s the most obvious statement. “She’s this very innovative, modern, artistic, bohemian, free woman, who just happens to live in a city at a time where that’s not allowed. She’s always questioning things: why women should be forced into marriage, why they shouldn’t be allowed to work. She provokes thought and conversation. She’s a breath of fresh air in a world that is so stuffy.” You can hear her affection for the character in every breath. It is also impossible not to notice the through-line in her career: Daisy Jones and the Six’s Camila, strong and selfless; The Night Manager’s Roxana, alluring and calculated; Gonzo Girl’s Alley, fiercely ambitious. And now, Ellen Olenska, feminism in a corset.

When I ask about her fashion philosophy, she simply says “unhinged”, with that same infectious laugh. She adapts to whatever city she’s living in: all-black in New York, bolder in Italy, Chanel in Paris. She doesn’t follow trends, mostly because she can’t keep up with them, and she wears roughly 10 to 15 pieces on rotation. “After spending hours getting dressed in corsets and petticoats for The Age of Innocence, I like my real life to be really easy,” she says. Her favorite Latin designers? Carolina Herrera, who dressed her for The Night Manager premiere in London, and Gabriela Hearst, who is also her neighbor. “I’m trying to simplify everything in my life; that includes fashion,” says Morrone. “Everything else is chaotic enough.”

She is finding time to read again – Lisa Taddeo’s Animal, after loving Three Women – and has a year-long streak of daily gratitude practice, courtesy of being a participant at personal-growth retreat The Hoffman Process. She is fiercely pro-therapy (“nobody is exempt”), devoted to nervous-system regulation, loyal to Love Is Blind and in what she calls her “yes era”. She recently took up horseback riding after falling in love with it on The Age of Innocence set. What else does the next 10 years hold? More twerking videos, for sure. She also wants to try stand-up comedy. She wants to produce. She wants a Nancy Meyers-style rom-com – think How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, There’s Something About Mary or Notting Hill. She wants to shoot a film in Tokyo, where she will also visit the hundreds of matcha cafés she has currently saved on Google Maps. She can see an 1800s Victorian farmhouse in her future, one where she’ll spend years and all of her money renovating and she wants to be, in her words, “Martha Stewart – minus the ability to cook.”

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