Jodhi May

The Girl Who Didn't Want to Be Famous

Jodhi May won the Cannes Film Festival Best Actress award in 1988.

She was twelve years old. She shared the award with Barbara Hershey for A World Apart and became the youngest winner in the festival's history. That evening, the British press tried to turn her into the next national prodigy, but she chose to go back to school the following Monday.

And the gamble paid off.

In 1992, she took part in The Last of the Mohicans under the direction of Michael Mann. Her character had barely any dialogue, but her gaze carried much of the family drama in front of the camera. However, May chose to keep studying at the University of Oxford instead of moving to Los Angeles to chase million-dollar contracts.

That distance from the Hollywood industry defined her career afterward. She never sought absolute stardom. For her, cinema has always been about textures, not screen time.

The Refuge of Broken Characters

Throughout the 1990s, she specialized in roles of suffocating intensity. In 1994, she starred in Sister My Sister alongside Joely Richardson. The film explored an incestuous and criminal relationship between two sisters working as maids. It was a bleak, violent job that definitively moved her away from her image as a child actress.

Nobody knew where to place her.

In 2000, she played Grace Stepney in The House of Mirth. Terence Davies cast her to embody envy and social repression in New York at the turn of the century. May used her ability to convey complex emotions without moving a single facial muscle.

Her name soon became a regular fixture in the BBC's period productions. She appeared in Daniel Deronda in 2002 and in The Other Boleyn Girl in 2003 (where she played Anne Boleyn ahead of Natalie Portman's film version). She worked steadily but kept an almost nonexistent public profile.

The industry never managed to tame her.

She has maintained thirty years of acting without a single scandalous interview or any appearance in the gossip press. In an industry obsessed with visibility, she chose controlled disappearance.

The Invasion of Major Franchises

The turn of the century brought an opening toward high-budget television. In 2015, she appeared in the first episode of the fifth season of Game of Thrones. She played Maggy the Frog (the witch who prophesies Cersei Lannister's fate). It was a cameo of just a few minutes, but it was essential to the show's main storyline.

In 2019, she accepted the role of Queen Calanthe in The Witcher. Her character was a fierce warrior, breaking away from her usual roles as restrained or suffering women. She had to learn swordplay and film battle scenes in heavy armor on location in Hungary and the Canary Islands.

Despite the massive success of these streaming platforms, her pace of life in London has not changed. She still alternates stage work with independent productions that often go unnoticed by the general public.

In 2023, she filmed the series The Castaways in Greece. It was a physically demanding shoot that required her to spend weeks in isolated natural settings. Jodhi May prefers projects that demand technical or physical effort over those that chase constant publicity.

In 2024, she signed on for the series Dune: Prophecy to play Empress Natalya. Filming took place under an absolute confidentiality agreement at the studios in Budapest.