Phony Baloney Pro-Noun-y Privilege

I know that actors are meant to be ‘chameleons’, but Emma Corrin is a remarkably consistent and – if I may use a rude word – binary one. Best known for her brilliant turn as the young Diana in The Crown, Corrin appears to have two distinct faces when off set, rather like the masks that traditionally represent the dramatic arts – Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, and Thalia, the muse of comedy.

Her face in posed photographs is invariably as solemn as Melpomene. Not least as she uses every interview to explain ‘the difficulties of “discovering” their (sic) gender identity while working as an actor’, as a Daily Mail headline had it in 2022. Corrin announced her she / they pronouns to a waiting world on Instagram back in July 2021, before switching to they / them a few months later. As she told the Mail: ‘My identity and being nonbinary is an embrace of many different parts of myself, the masculine and the feminine and everything in between… It’s hard to be discovering something in yourself at the same time you’re navigating an industry that demands a lot of you, in terms of knowing who you are.’

In a more upbeat mood, she once told The Sunday Times: ‘I don’t know where my gender exploration is going to go and I don’t really want to think about it, I just know that I feel more comfortable in myself than I have in a long time.’

I too have been struck by how ‘comfortable’ Corrin looks recently – especially in the numerous unposed images of her out and about with her boyfriend, actor Rami Malek. Whenever she is on LA lunch dates, London date nights or strolling on Venice beach with her beau, there is not a hint of mardy Melpomene instructing us to address ‘them’ as ‘Mx’. Instead, we see laughing Thalia. In such photographs, Corrin’s life doesn’t look hard or demanding at all. Rather, she looks like what she so obviously is – a privately educated person from Royal Tunbridge Wells who has worked consistently to ceaseless praise since leaving Cambridge. But you can bet your sweet nonbinary bippy that come the next interview the long face will be back and sensible people will have to control the strong temptation to tell her to just cheer up.