Emilia Jones, the CODA star who keeps outplaying her own films

Emilia Jones

Photo: Lyn Fairly Media / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 23, 2002 Westminster, London, England
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, One Day, CODA
Awards	SAG Award · Gotham

In Charlie Harper, which reached American cinemas last week, Emilia Jones plays a young cook trying to build a career in a new city while the man she followed there drifts. Critics split on the film and agreed on her: the Rotten Tomatoes consensus faults its flashy storytelling and praises the actress at its centre. That verdict has followed Jones for five years, and it frames the real question of her career. She keeps arriving before the material does, and the projects now lining up are the first ones built to carry her weight.

The film that made her name asked for something few leads attempt. In CODA, Siân Heder’s drama about the only hearing member of a deaf fishing family in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Jones had to sign fluently opposite Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin and Daniel Durant, sing well enough to be believed as a Berklee hopeful and handle a working trawler. She spent nine months learning American Sign Language. The performance lives between two languages, and the scenes in which Ruby interprets for her parents carry a tired teenage irritation that no amount of coaching could fake.

Jones grew up around performers. Her father is Aled Jones, the Welsh singer who was famous as a boy soprano before he became a broadcaster, and her mother, Claire Fossett, worked as a circus performer. She was born in Westminster on 23 February 2002, raised in Barnes in south-west London and educated at Kew House School. Acting found her almost by accident: an agent running an improvisation class cast her, at eight, in Lone Scherfig’s One Day, and a small part in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides followed the same year.

The stage trained her before the camera did. She played Young Fiona in Shrek the Musical at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, then Flora in Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s version of The Turn of the Screw at the Almeida, sharing the part on alternate nights with two other girls. Television handed her dark material early. She was Alice in Dennis Kelly’s Channel 4 conspiracy thriller Utopia and sang “The Long Song” in an episode of Doctor Who. Her teenage film work ran through Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, Martin Koolhoven’s western Brimstone and Pascal Laugier’s horror film Ghostland, often in roles that placed her at the unsettling edge of an adult story.

Netflix’s Locke & Key gave her three seasons as Kinsey Locke, a girl who uses a magic key to remove her own fear; Jones has said she took the part for the chance to play two versions of the same character. CODA then opened the online edition of the Sundance Film Festival in January 2021, and Apple paid a festival-record 25 million dollars for it. In March 2022 it became the first film from a streaming service to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and Kotsur became the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar. Jones was nominated for the BAFTA for Best Actress and shared the Screen Actors Guild award for best cast with the ensemble.

The win has not aged without argument. NPR’s critic called the film unabashedly formulaic, and it is a remake of the French hit La Famille Bélier, which deaf viewers had criticised for casting hearing actors whose signing was unconvincing. Heder corrected that by casting deaf actors as the family, yet some deaf critics still objected that the story is told through the hearing daughter and suggests her parents cannot share her love of music. Jones sits at the centre of that tension. The role that proved her range is also the one through which a deaf story was routed to a hearing audience. That is a complaint about the script, not the performance, but it complicates the idea of CODA as a simple triumph.

On paper, her choices after the Oscar look modest. In Susanna Fogel’s Cat Person, adapted from Kristen Roupenian’s widely shared New Yorker story, she played a student whose date with an older man, played by Nicholas Braun, curdles into dread; the film drew mixed reviews. Andrew Durham’s Fairyland, produced by Sofia Coppola from Alysia Abbott’s memoir, cast her as a daughter raised by her widowed gay father, played by Scoot McNairy, in 1970s and 1980s San Francisco as the AIDS epidemic arrived. It premiered at Sundance in 2023 and reached American cinemas only in October 2025. Fogel then gave her the title role in Winner, about Reality Winner, the former Air Force linguist imprisoned for leaking a classified intelligence report.

The last year brought both scale and the strongest notices of her career. Edgar Wright cast her opposite Glen Powell as Amelia Williams in his adaptation of Stephen King‘s The Running Man, released in November 2025. HBO’s Task, Brad Ingelsby’s crime series with Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey, gave her Maeve, the niece raising the children of Pelphrey’s robber, and several reviewers named her the standout of the ensemble. The part earned her a nomination for best supporting actress at the 2026 BAFTA Television Awards.

In August, A24 released Matt Johnson’s Tony, in which she plays Nancy, the high-school sweetheart whom a 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain, played by Dominic Sessa, follows to Provincetown in the summer that sent him into restaurant kitchens. The real Nancy Putkoski was later married to Bourdain for twenty years. Charlie Harper, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025, followed in September.

What comes next puts her at the centre. She plays midfielder Julie Foudy in Nicole Kassell’s The 99’ers, Netflix’s film about the United States team that won the 1999 Women’s World Cup; shooting has wrapped and the film is due in 2027. She leads Bad Bridgets, Rich Peppiatt’s period crime film with Alison Oliver about two Irish sisters who escape to New York and fall in with a band of emigrant women. And in Molly Smith Metzler’s Netflix series The Retrievals, based on Susan Burton’s podcast about the Yale fertility patients who endured egg retrievals without effective pain relief after a nurse stole their fentanyl, she plays Gabby Clemente, a New Haven bartender and student teacher, alongside Amy Ryan and Jessica Chastain. After years of being the best thing in other people’s stories, Jones now has three that are built around her.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, actresses, British cinema, Mark Ruffalo, Emilia Jones, CODA, Siân Heder

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