Ella Hunt is at her best when a character has decided not to say the thing, and lets us watch the deciding. Sue Gilbert in Dickinson is the proof; the films since have given her less room to do it.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Ella Hunt in Dickinson when Emily is talking and Sue is not. The scenes between the two women are shot close, mostly at night, mostly in whispers, and Hunt's job is to listen: engaged to the brother, in love with the sister, working out exactly what the arrangement will cost her. She lets the sum cross her face and does nothing else. Alena Smith's script, which elsewhere cannot leave a joke alone, stops pointing for a minute, and that is largely Hunt's doing.
She started young, in Intruders (2011), Les Misérables (2012) and Robot Overlords (2015), then on television in Cold Feet (2016–2017). The part that established her was Anna Shepherd in Anna and the Apocalypse (2018), a zombie musical set at Christmas, and it used the other half of her: she sings, and has kept up a parallel career as a singer-songwriter alongside the acting. Dickinson (2019–2021) took her to New York for three seasons opposite Hailee Steinfeld. Since then the films have been bigger and the parts smaller: Lady Chatterley's Lover (2022), Master (2022), Kevin Costner's Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 (2024), and Jason Reitman's Saturday Night (2024), where she plays Gilda Radner.
What works is stillness with something behind it. Hunt has said that stoic roles are a real comfort zone for her, and she is right to be wary of that, because the comfort shows when a film gives her nothing to be stoic about. In Horizon she is the English wife on Luke Wilson's wagon train who refuses to do her own chores, a running joke that gets about as much screen time as the film's Native characters, and the part gives her nothing to withhold, so she is simply a joke the film repeats. Nobody could have done much with it. But it is a waste of the one thing she does better than most actors her age.
We went into Dickinson braced for the slang and the pop soundtrack and came out thinking about Hunt, which we had not expected. What did it was the whispering: a scene in which Sue says almost nothing and we understood everything she was being asked to give up, without the script telling us. Steinfeld gets the poems and the carriage ride with Death. Hunt gets the silences, and makes them the reason to keep watching.
The question now is whether anyone will write her a part that wants the whole of her, Sue Gilbert's watchfulness and Anna Shepherd's noise in the same film. Playing Gilda Radner is at least a different kind of demand. Until that part arrives, start with Dickinson, forgive the slang, and wait for the lights to go down in Amherst.
Biography
Ella Hunt is an English actress and singer-songwriter. Born on 29 April 1998 in Westminster, London, she began her career as a child actress with roles in the films Intruders (2011), Les Misérables (2012) and Robot Overlords (2015).
On television she appeared as Ellie Marsden in the ITV series Cold Feet (2016–2017) and as Sue Gilbert in the Apple TV+ series Dickinson (2019–2021). Her film work includes the lead role of Anna Shepherd in Anna and the Apocalypse (2018), for which she received a Scottish BAFTA nomination, Mrs Flint in Lady Chatterley's Lover (2022) and Gilda Radner in Saturday Night (2024).
She made her stage debut in 2022 as Alice in a production of Closer at the Lyric Hammersmith. Hunt played Juliette Chesney in Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 (2024) and its sequel.
