Aisling Francioisi - ‘I spat on Jamie Dornan and Paul Mescal for work’ (2024)

Aisling Franciosi has the dubious distinction of spitting on two of Ireland’s most desirable actors. In one episode of The Fall, a TV series in which she played the troubled ingenue to Jamie Dornan’s serial killer, the director asked her to spit on her co-star. “I’m not actually going to spit in his face?” she asked incredulously. “The director said yes, and Jamie was like, ‘Oh my God, no, no!’ ” Then in one scene from God’s Creatures, Franciosi’s new film, her character spits on Paul Mescal — and it required a few takes. “In one take I managed to somehow spit on my own chin, which I didn’t even know was possible. Paul was great about it. I felt horrible.”

Franciosi, fortunately, did not get gobby with Sandra Bullock when they worked together on the Netflix movie The Unforgivable (2021), she says, “but I did have to hug her, and that was one of the first films that went back to production in 2020 [during the pandemic]. So everyone was on high alert. I thought, ‘Oh my God, what if I’m the one to give Sandra Bullock Covid and they have to shut the production down?’ ”

The 29-year-old Irish-Italian actor is talking to me two days after arriving back from Los Angeles, where she was seeing friends and attending work meetings. She is still jet-lagged, so her responses “might take a little bit of thinking”, she says. “But I really want to be candid.” And she is certainly that. “I feel like we’re chatting at an interesting time. This last year I’ve come to a lot of realisations. I grieve my naivety from my early twenties. This last year was very weird for me. I love the work. It is what makes me the happiest in the world. I think I’m my best self when I’m working, but I am growing disenchanted with the industry.”

More on her disenchantment later. For now: the work. This is where Franciosi shines. From early performances in Quirke (2014) through to her breakthrough in The Fall in the mid-2010s and on to The Nightingale (2018), in which she played a vengeful Irish immigrant in 1800s Tasmania, the actress excels at playing characters who appear fragile and vulnerable from the outside but are buoyed by an inner resolve and defiance. She describes her profession as a form of catharsis.

In life she “keeps negative emotions bottled up. When I play these characters I can let those emotions out. If I try and psychoanalyse myself — which is always a bad idea — the very reason I was attracted to acting was because I could do and say whatever I wanted and the repercussions weren’t for me.”

God’s Creatures tells the story of Brian (Mescal), a young man who returns to a small Irish fishing community to revive his family’s oyster farm. When Brian is accused of raping Sarah (Franciosi), a family friend, his mother (Emily Watson) instinctively lies to give him an alibi. “The writing of God’s Creatures struck me instantly,” she says. “It was such a quietly powerful movie. There weren’t any overly melodramatic scenes. It felt very real and Irish in a non twiddly-dee-type way.”

● God’s Creatures review — Paul Mescal shines in an Irish drama of secrets

The film was shot around the coast of Donegal — her first time working on the island since she was here for Game of Thrones in 2017. As a child she grew up with her mother in Cabinteely in Dublin and stayed with her father in Italy during the holidays, so she had never visited Donegal before and was struck by “the landscape’s ruggedness and harsh beauty”. The characters work in a fish processing plant and she learnt how to gut fish for the part.

A more sensitive area of research was learning how to depict Sarah’s trauma. “I had played a victim of sexual violence already, in The Nightingale, and I had done months of research [meeting social workers and survivors of rape], with a clinical psychologist alongside me, into trauma and recovery. Not just the psychological symptoms but the physiological symptoms,” she says.

She persuaded Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer, the directors of God’s Creatures, to consult the same Australian psychologist to ensure the utmost accuracy. In the story the community sides with Brian and Sarah is shunned. This speaks to a sad reality. The vast majority of rapes go unreported; fewer still lead to prosecution, let alone conviction. “It could be a small-town community anywhere,” Franciosi says. “Frequently it is the victim who has to change their life or deal with the repercussions. This script poses questions and leaves it up to the audience to decide how they feel and think. I hope that it will spark a conversation.”

The actress is drawn to projects that encourage debate long after the credits have rolled. The Nightingale, for example, deals with the decimation — and near-genocide — of an indigenous population, alongside the treatment of Irish migrants in colonial eras. “Sometimes the film and TV industry is just entertainment, and that’s valid, but sometimes it can do things that are really important,” she says. “There’s a power in certain stories being told. It’s not just that I’m drawn to them, they seem to be drawn to me too.”

God’s Creatures wrapped production two years ago but struggled to find a distributor in Ireland until a few months ago. Interest in the film was probably helped by Mescal’s Oscar nomination — “Paul takes the work seriously but doesn’t take himself too seriously. That’s always a good combination,” Franciosi says — but the film’s rocky journey speaks to some of her disillusionments. In 2021 Franciosi was cast to play Kate Rothko, the daughter of the painter Mark Rothko, in a film based on a true story about the legal battle for her father’s estate. But the project is apparently no more. “I was due to meet Kate and I was really looking forward to it,” she says. “We’ll see what happens. This happens frequently with independent films.”

In recent times she has come to reflect on her position within the film industry. “There is a phrase they use in the US: ‘This actor has no value.’ Financiers will have a list and be like, ‘This person’s great, but they’ve got no value, no sales power, no draw.’ I am very much an actor who has ‘no value’. Directors tell me that actors send them CVs that detail their number of Instagram followers. I’m terrible on social media and I’ve no interest in it. Look, I’m not naive. I get that it’s a business. It’s just that when you have a director who wants to work with you but their financiers say ‘no’, it becomes difficult. Also, I’ve noticed elements of sexism that I presumed were getting better but maybe aren’t. Just in terms of seeing the experiences of some older actresses who are incredible but get very little fanfare.”

Despite her distaste for these dark mechanisms, she still adores the work. Later this year she is appearing in The Last Voyage of Demeter, a big-budget Dracula spin-off from Universal Pictures. All she can do, I suggest, is focus on the work and her track record will speak for itself. The rest is beyond her control.

“You’re right. I would hope that it’s about the legacy. I’m sure some actors will read this and think, ‘Shut the hell up. You’re a paid actor.’ But I wouldn’t have known these things a few years ago. I feel immensely privileged that I work in a profession I dreamt of being in when I was six years old. There aren’t that many people who can say that. I feel very lucky.”

God’s Creatures is in cinemas from Friday

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