Emilia Jones often plays young women negotiating family duties and their own wishes, and takes the practical demands of those roles seriously. We are interested in her; we are less persuaded by some of the writing she gets.
Fi1m perspective
In The Running Man (2025), Emilia Jones plays Amelia Williams, a member of the public pulled into a chase that scarcely has time for her. Edgar Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall hurry her character's development, leaving Jones to make the changes convincing on their timetable. We grew impatient with the film because each new contact and chase seemed to start it again. That is a problem with the writing, and it would be unfair to treat it as evidence that Jones cannot hold our attention. It does, however, leave her with too little room to do so.
The more useful starting point is CODA (2021), her breakthrough as the lead, Ruby Rossi. After teen work that included Locke & Key (2020–2022), it gave her a part whose demands extended beyond learning the dialogue. She trained in American Sign Language and singing, learnt to operate fishing equipment and performed the musical passages live on set. That preparation matters because family responsibility is a recurring subject in her roles: knowing how to do the work can help an actor make those duties believable without a speech explaining them.
Her work since CODA has included Cat Person (2023) and the television drama Task (2025), alongside Wright's studio action film. In Task, as Maeve Prendergrast, she handles difficult family dynamics and high-pressure scenes, material that suits her seriousness. We found the family troubles surrounding Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey worth caring about, though the investigation took too long to gather pace. It is a decent programme for patient viewers, and its shortage of humour makes the waiting harder than it needs to be.
We would like to see Jones given more time to make a character's decisions understandable. Her move between independent dramas and larger studio projects has supplied different kinds of work, but The Running Man is a reminder that a well-cast film can still underuse an actor. The preparation for CODA gives us a more substantial reason to be interested than the size of any subsequent production. For another action role, we would hope for a script that lets her finish thinking before the next chase starts.
Biography
Emilia Jones is a British actress. She was born on 23 February 2002 in London.
Jones began her career as a child actress in West End theatre, with early television roles in Doctor Who (2013) and Utopia (2013–2014). Her film credits include Brimstone (2016), Ghostland (2018) and Horrible Histories (2019).
She is known for her lead role in the film CODA (2021), for which she received a British Academy Film Award nomination for Best Actress, and for starring in the Netflix series Locke & Key (2020–2022). Later credits include The Running Man (2025) and the series Task (2025).
