Jessica Barden plays girls who go in shoving and then, for about a second, forget to. Alyssa in The End of the F*ing World (2017) is the clearest case, and the parts since have mostly asked for the same girl.
Fi1m perspective
Alyssa Foley swears at a waitress within minutes of arriving in The End of the F*ing World (2017), and for a while that seems to be all Jessica Barden is doing: attacking, shoving her way into James's life, daring anyone to mind. Then, early in the drive, Alyssa asks James for something small and ordinary, and Barden plays the request as if it had cost her everything she had. We laughed at the set-up and then stopped laughing, because she had turned a rude joke into the saddest thing in the episode without changing her face. That is what she does. The front is loud, the crack in it lasts about a second, and she does not hold it open to be admired.
She had been working for years before that. There was a small television part in 1999, a stint in Coronation Street between 2007 and 2008, Jerusalem on stage in 2009, then Tamara Drewe (2010) and Hanna (2011). In The Lobster (2015) she is the Nosebleed Woman, one of the hotel's stranger guests, and it says something about how crowded Lanthimos's cast is that our review did not single her out. The End of the F*ing World ran until 2019 and made her a lead. Since then the credits have come steadily: Scarborough (2018), Holler (2020), Pink Skies Ahead (2020), Pieces of Her (2022), You & Me (2023) and, as the young Valya Harkonnen, Dune: Prophecy (2024).
What works is the deadpan, and the way she lets it fail. She delivers a cruel line flat and then, a beat late, looks as though she heard it too. Covell's voice-over in The End of the F*ing World is built for exactly this, since we hear Alyssa think one thing while she says another, and Barden makes the gap between the two the whole performance. Alex Lawther's James is the still thing she keeps knocking against, and the series is at its best when neither of them can look at the other. What does not work is not her doing. The parts she is offered keep circling the same girl: troubled, working-class, on the edge of something, and she has said as much. Of You & Me she said: "I got to play a normal person, which I felt like I’ve never been able to do." Playing the hard girl who softens for a second is a fine thing to be good at, but it is one thing.
Start with the first series of The End of the F*ing World, and watch the car scenes twice. Then see what she does with Valya Harkonnen, where swearing at waitresses is presumably off the table.
Biography
Jessica Amy Barden (born 21 July 1992) is an English actress. She began her career as a child actor with appearances in the ITV soap opera Coronation Street (2007–2008) and the stage production Jerusalem (2009).
Barden is known for her role as Alyssa Foley in the Channel 4 series The End of the F*ing World (2017–2019). Her film credits include Tamara Drewe (2010), Hanna (2011), The Lobster (2015) as the Nosebleed Woman, and Far from the Madding Crowd (2015). She received a British Independent Film Award nomination for Scarborough (2018). Barden is married to director Max Winkler.
