Esmé Creed-Miles, the shy rocker who became Austen’s Marianne Dashwood

Esmé Creed-Miles

Photo: David Maynard Photography / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 5, 2000 Barnet, London, England
Occupation	Actress and musician
Known for	The Thicket, Mister Lonely, The Chronology of Water

On the set of Sense and Sensibility, Esmé Creed-Miles asked the crew to call her “Miss Marianne” between takes. It was not vanity. Marianne Dashwood, the Austen sister who falls in love at full volume, sits about as far as a character can from the actor playing her, a woman who calls herself shy, looks more at home with a guitar in a Brixton pub than in a Regency drawing room and says music came first. The nickname was a costume she could keep on when the cameras stopped.

That gap between the parts she is offered and the person she describes runs through her whole career. She has played an assassin raised in a forest, the youngest of Neil Gaiman’s Endless, a kidnapped girl in a frontier western and a doll painter in Victorian London. With Georgia Oakley’s Austen adaptation in cinemas and her alt-rock band Cusk on the road, she has reached the point where an actor either becomes a leading lady or decides she would rather not.

Acting was the family trade before it was hers. Her parents are Samantha Morton and Charlie Creed-Miles, and she was born in Barnet, north London, on 5 February 2000. Her first screen role came at about seven, in Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, a fable about celebrity impersonators sharing a commune in the Scottish Highlands: she was the Shirley Temple lookalike, her mother was Marilyn Monroe. The film premiered at Cannes in 2007. She has said she has never watched it.

A decade away from the screen followed, with schooling at Bedales, the progressive boarding school in Hampshire. She came back as young Alice in Clio Barnard’s Dark River in 2017 and, the following year, took leading parts in two small British films, Undercliffe and Pond Life. The second, Bill Buckhurst’s adaptation of Richard Cameron’s play about teenagers on a summer fishing trip in 1994, matters more in hindsight: one of the other girls was Daisy Edgar-Jones. Seven years later the two would play sisters.

The break was Hanna. David Farr’s series for Amazon Prime Video reworked Joe Wright’s 2011 film about a girl raised in the wilderness to kill, and cast her in the title role opposite Joel Kinnaman and Mireille Enos. She trained six hours a day for months for the fight sequences. The show ran for three seasons, from 2019 to 2021, and earned her a Critics’ Choice Super Award nomination for best actress in an action series. It also fixed an image, the feral teenage fighter, that she has spent the years since taking apart.

What came next was chosen against that image, usually in small rooms. In Sacha Polak’s Silver Haze, which opened in the Panorama section of the Berlinale in 2023, she was Florence, the patient a young nurse played by Vicky Knight falls for. Polak then directed her as Iris Whittle, an aspiring painter, in the Paramount+ thriller The Doll Factory, from Elizabeth Macneal’s novel. In The Thicket, Elliott Lester’s western with Peter Dinklage and Juliette Lewis, she was Lula, the abducted sister whose rescue drives the plot.

The Sandman widened the audience. Netflix cast her as Delirium, the youngest of the Endless, for the second season in 2025, and reviewers singled out her road trip with Tom Sturridge’s Dream as the season’s most compelling pairing. Set beside the comics, her Delirium is more subdued, and the restraint looks deliberate. The same year she took a small, painful role as Claire in The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart‘s first film as a director, which premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes.

There is a cost to the route she has taken. A career steered by directors rather than parts yields interesting work and a blurred public image. Hanna asked viewers to accept a new girl in a part Saoirse Ronan had already played on film, and its first season drew mixed reviews. Pond Life and Silver Haze reached festival audiences far more than the public, and her warmest notices have come inside ensembles. She is frank about where the power sits. Acting, she told Elle, can be “the best job in the world if you are working for a brilliant director”, and the worst one when the director is bad. Marianne Dashwood is the most conventional role she has accepted, and she plays it while telling interviewers she meant to be a musician.

Cusk is that other career. She formed the band with the violinist Evie Hilyer-Ziegler after the two met at an improvisation night at the Shacklewell Arms in Dalston, and their first show was at The Windmill in Brixton in April 2024. She plays guitar, enlisted the producer Jorge Elbrecht to co-produce the first demos, and brought in Warpaint’s Jenny Lee Lindberg to sing on one track. After support slots with DIIV and a British tour with The Murder Capital, the band released its self-titled debut EP on 14 August 2026 through The Bird Records, the label of Black Country, New Road drummer Charlie Wayne. “I wanted to make music when I was 18, and I ended up getting swept up into acting,” she told Rolling Stone UK.

Sense and Sensibility is the bet in the opposite direction. Oakley, whose debut Blue Jean won a BAFTA, shot it on film for Working Title from Diana Reid’s script, with Edgar-Jones as Elinor and Frank Dillane as Willoughby. It opened in British cinemas through Universal on 25 September 2026 and reaches American screens through Focus Features on 16 October. Creed-Miles has said that working on film, with far fewer takes, felt like “capturing an instinct”, and that Edgar-Jones, her co-star from Pond Life, is “one of the best people I know”.

The next projects lean darker. In May 2026 she joined Panos Cosmatos’s Flesh of the Gods, a vampire thriller set in 1980s Los Angeles that A24 will release in the United States, starring Kristen Stewart and Wagner Moura; she took over a role first attached to Elizabeth Olsen. She also plays the adult Merry in Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s A Head Full of Ghosts, from Paul Tremblay‘s novel, opposite Rebecca Hall and David Harbour. Still pending is Lucia, Alexandra McGuinness’s drama in which she is attached to play James Joyce‘s dancer daughter. In June she sat on the feature jury of the Biarritz Nouvelles Vagues festival, under Stewart’s presidency.

Marianne settles whether she can carry a period drama for a major studio. What she does with that leverage is still open. Her next two films belong to a cult genre director and a pair of Austrian horror filmmakers, and the band has a debut EP to take on tour.

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