DAISY EDGAR-JONES sure knows how to throw a punch. In the trailer for Where The Crawdads Sing, the feature adaptation of Delia Owens’ bestselling novel, Edgar-Jones’ character Kya strikes a young man forcefully across the face. “Oh, thank you!” she says when Empire compliments her on her left hook. Her technique, it turns out, had been perfected on Sebastian Stan in Fresh, a romantic horror about cannibalism, which was also her first major movie role. “You really just have to go for it and give them a full wallop.”
Besides hand-to-hand combat, the actor had to acquire a whole new range of skills — not to mention a Southern accent — to play Kya, a resourceful young woman who has raised herself on the North Carolina marshes after being abandoned by her family. “I did loads of motorboat training, and by the end of it was really good. I actually really enjoyed doing it,” recalls Edgar-Jones. Fishing also came with the part, and Edgar-Jones took up drawing classes since Kya is a talented illustrator. “Then I tried to read as many of the books that Kya reads as I could, like [A Sand County] Almanac,” she adds.