THOUGH PERHAPS KNOWN best for playing student Maeve in Netflix’s very British comedy Sex Education, Emma Mackey in fact spent the first 17 years of her life growing up in France. With Eiffel, a Frenchlanguage period drama about Gustave Eiffel, the man behind the iconic Parisian monument, the Francophone actor returns to home soil as the engineer’s forbidden love, Adrienne Bourgès. She tells Empire about a trip back across the Channel, her hopes of directing, and how she’s embracing the plastic fantastic world of Greta Gerwig ’s Barbie.
What interested you about Eiffel?