Francis Ford Coppola has been working on Megalopolis for longer than its leading lady, Nathalie Emmanuel, has been alive. This week, the long-gestating sci-fi epic premieres at the Cannes Film Festival, marking a major career milestone for them both: while Coppola, 85, has spent a rumoured $120 million of his own money bringing the project to life (courting some controversy along the way), Emmanuel, 35, is on the verge of a major breakthrough after years as a memorable supporting actor in some of the most recognisable franchises (Game of Thrones, Fast and Furious) of recent years.

“I almost feel like I’m unqualified to speak about the life of this film, because it’s been a full 40 years in the making,” Emmanuel tells Vogue from London ahead of her arrival in France. For the British actor, this moment, as the film gears up to meet its first audience, is both “exciting” and “nerve-wracking”. It’s been nearly five years since she first met Coppola to discuss the ambitious scope of Megalopolis and her involvement in it, yet very few people know anything beyond its very basic plot description: an architect tries to rebuild a utopian city called New Rome after a disaster destroys it.

The experience of making Megalopolis was unlike anything Emmanuel had done before – and it undoubtedly marked a jumping-off point for the kinds of prestige projects that could change the course of her career. Here, before Megalopolis’s world-premiere screening on 16 May, she shares how she became involved in the film, the details of her character, and what going to the Cannes Film Festival means to her.
Is this your first time going to the festival?

It’s not – I actually went to Cannes in 2018 when they screened a short film that I produced, and I went to a couple of screenings too, but this is my first time going as someone who is in the official selection. It’s slightly surreal. Watching [movies] on that epic screen was kind of amazing.
Everyone’s extremely excited to see this film after so long. How have you tried to describe it?

[Coppola] is not a conformist by any means, and I’ve never seen anything quite like this before. It’s really trying to break barriers and ask big, bold questions. It’s a very artistic and experimental movie.
Let’s go back to the beginning. How did you get involved with it?

[Coppola and I] had an initial meeting that was very informal, and then the pandemic happened. When it did kind of come around again, towards the end of 2021, I ended up having a Zoom with Francis. We played, like, a theatre game, and he asked me to choose a line from a song or a movie, then he just said, “Okay, say it in all these different ways…” Like the punchline of a joke, or like you’re breaking bad news to somebody. We talked about the script, and he told me a bit about the character, and then I got the call to say that they’d like me to do it.
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It’s been just a few hours since Nathalie Emmanuel has seen Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis for the first time, and she’s settling on the right words to describe the experience.

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” says the actress, talking over Zoom from London in late April, as she pauses for a second to collect her thoughts.

Coppola’s epic, which will have its red carpet world premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, casts Emmanuel in a starring role opposite a stacked ensemble that includes Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Fishburne and Jason Schwartzman. “The movie feels like a real call to arms,” she says. “It asks big questions. In spite of all the horrible, hard and devastating realities of the world that we live in, how can we make it better? It feels like there’s hope or a possibility for something better.”

And there’s nothing quite like Megalopolis’ wild backstory. Coppola self-financed the $120 million experimental epic that has been ruminating in his mind for four decades. On the eve of the film’s big reveal in Cannes, Emmanuel opened up about the experience of shooting Coppola’s passion project — which also represents a big play for the British thespian, who broke out playing fan-favorite Missandei on HBO’s Game of Thrones. Since then, she’s rolled with the Fast & Furious gang, joined the Maze Runner franchise and gone toe-to-toe with Kevin Hart in his Die Hart series.

As for Megalopolis, the film centers on an ambitious architect named Caesar (Driver), who wants to rebuild New Rome — a city similar in size and scope to New York — as a utopia following an apocalyptic disaster. Emmanuel describes her character, Julia Cicero, as the “beloved daughter” of Esposito’s character, the first African American mayor of New Rome. “She finds herself very intrigued and fascinated by Caesar,” she says. “He also just so happens to be her father’s kind of archnemesis, so she finds herself stuck between these two worlds and trying to work out her place in it.”
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