Alison Oliver leaps up from the couch and merrily yells out my name. We had both, apparently, been wondering if, four years ago, I was the first journalist ever to interview her. So it seems.
“Your name just popped up and I thought, yeah, I think that was the first one,” she says, bubbling.
I remember it well. It was the end of 2021, and we were putting together a list of people to watch in 2022. Oliver, a recent graduate of the Lir, the national academy of dramatic art, had just been cast as the lead in Element Pictures’ adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends.
As follow-up to a world-conquering take on the same author’s Normal People, the series was big news and Oliver’s arrival a cause for celebration.
“Alison’s audition tape was a revelation,” Lenny Abrahamson, director of the series, told me at the time. “In terms of subtlety, expressiveness and screen presence, she’s the equal of any actor I’ve worked with.”
This remains a tough business. Plenty of talented folk have struggled after receiving an early break. Not this daughter of Cork City. She currently occupies an ornate room on the first floor of Claridge’s Hotel, in Mayfair in London. The enormous press junket for Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” – this season’s unavoidable movie – spreads across the luxury establishment like a flowery weather system.
Oliver, excellent as Isabella Linton in the film, can’t have guessed where she would so soon end up when we had that phone call back in 2021.
“Oh, my God, yeah,” she says. “When I think back to the beginning of all of that it’s just so mad. I was in the Lir and – I know it sounds modest or whatever – but I really didn’t imagine a film career for myself. Like so many of us, we were just dreaming to work in the Lir or work in the Abbey or Gate or whatever.”
We will return to her cracking performance in “Wuthering Heights”, but let us first get a handle on how quickly things happened for Oliver.
Alison Oliver in Wuthering Heights
Fennell is an important part of the story. The English director cast her as Venetia, troubled sister to Jacob Elordi’s sleek snoot, in the much-discussed, much-memed Saltburn, from 2023. She had a key role opposite Sharon Horgan and Michael Sheen in Jack Thorne’s harrowing series Best Interests. She played opposite Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult in Justin Kurzel’s terrific thriller The Order, which premiered at Venice in 2024. She starred in a revival of Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan at the Almeida Theatre in London. She was in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa at the UK National Theatre.
That is quite some arrival. One is minded to ask if she has had time for a quiet sit down at any point in those four years.
“I actually have. I really have,” she says. “When I finished Conversations with Friends I don’t think I worked again for a while. I did another TV show. Then I did Saltburn. I did three plays. But, between all of that, there actually was time in between to just land – and move to London. And I was setting all of that up for myself.”
If she will excuse me employing such cliched waffle, Oliver appears impressively unchanged by all the kerfuffle. It is not just the work. Over the past year, Oliver has – something she, understandably, won’t answer questions on – found herself adorning front pages as the partner of the none-more-hot movie star Josh O’Connor. She attended the world premiere of his film The Mastermind at Cannes. They are papped walking blamelessly down the street.
Yet, dressed today in the most fabulous cocoon of bustling fabric, she sounds like the same borderline-shy Cork woman I talked with in 2022. They don’t teach you how to handle the red carpet at the Lir.
“I don’t think there is much you can do to prepare for it necessarily,” she says. “It’s always nerve-racking and sort of strange. But, I guess, you find your way. Tonight, for the premiere, I’m just bringing all of my friends and my parents from Cork. And I think you find your way of normalising it and having fun with it.”
Wuthering Heights: Alison Oliver and Margot Robbie in Emerald Fennell’s film. Photograph: Warner Bros
What have her parents made of it all? She was raised in a pretty ordinary home in Ballintemple. Oliver did a few acting classes a kid. But nobody can have seen this coming.
“They were so lovely,” she says. “I have sisters who are about six and a half years older than me, so by the time I was deciding what I wanted to do my parents were, um, lighter with me.
“They knew school wasn’t really my thing. And so I think they were just really pleased that I found a thing. You always want your children to just feel they’re passionate about something. And I felt lucky in that way. I don’t think they ever thought it would be like this.”
She looks about the lush curtains, the thick carpets and the circling attendants. She cackles.
“They’re, like. ‘This is just mad!’ Ha ha! They came here for dinner last night, and we were just laughing, the three of us. ‘What in the world is this?’ But they’re so supportive. And they were just enjoying it with me.”
[ ‘Wuthering Heights’ review: Less 120 Days of Sodom, more Carry on HeathcliffOpens in new window ]
Not that you would ever mistake Oliver for an aggressive, elbow-wielding striver. She is grateful for the opportunities but unapologetic about grasping them.
“Absolutely. You maybe don’t know it, because you’re living through it,” she says. “But I guess there are just those sort of periods. I remember Lenny saying that, when he was in college, he was friends with Ed Guiney and Dominic West. You sometimes get these groups of people who are all at the same time working together. I just feel so lucky and happy for my friends who are all doing so well.”
Let us talk about her relationship with Emerald Fennell. They could scarcely come from more different backgrounds. The actor’s mam is a social worker from Cork. Fennell, daughter of the jewellery designer Theo Fennell, was educated at Marlborough College – alma mater of the poet John Betjeman and Kate Middleton – before moving on to Greyfriars, a theological college at Oxford University.
But they see something in one another. Oliver’s turn as the damaged Venetia in Saltburn offered a poignant diversion amid the decadent pandemonium of a chaotic film.
She is better still as Isabella in “Wuthering Heights”. We first see her as awkwardly devoted stan to Margot Robbie’s overpowering Cathy. Later, now the misused wife of Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff, she sinks into properly disturbing degradation.
What explains the connection between Fennell and Oliver?
“I feel so grateful that I met her and that we crossed paths,” she says “Because I think at the time, when I was auditioning for Saltburn, I really didn’t think I was going to get that part. It was so different from me in so many ways.
“What’s amazing sometimes about directors is they can really see something in you that you don’t know you have access to. I felt she really believed in me and took a chance on me in a way. Having done that, it’s completely changed my life as well. I feel like I have such a close partnership with her.”
Saltburn: Alison Oliver as Venetia in Emerald Fennell’s 2023 film. Photograph: Warner Bros
She makes a sound point about Fennell finding something in Oliver that isn’t immediately obvious on the surface. She could hardly have a sunnier demeanour in person. Yet Venetia and Isabella both, ultimately, end up in the darkest places.
At least one of her scenes in Saltburn – the one where Barry Keoghan’s character pleasures Venetia orally at a particular point in the month – joined the list of those discussed endlessly as the film gathered its cult.
“With those types of scenes you come to it thinking, how is this telling the story and serving the narrative? I really trust Emerald and the people that I’ve got to work with. It’s just a case of, what is it about that scene that’s driving the story?”
The pre-release furore around “Wuthering Heights” has been deafening. It was back in July of 2024 that Fennell announced she would be shooting an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Gothic romance. There was some muttering. Two months later the two leads were announced, and, as Fennell surely hoped, the internet went bananas.
Wasn’t Elordi a little, erm, white for a character that, in recent years, many had decided was a person of colour? Wasn’t Robbie a little too old and a little too blond? Later, rumours emerged of rampaging violence and explicit alfresco sex amid the footage. Conservative columnists had written it off as sick filth even before a trailer had been released.
“Yeah, I know. Look, I think that comes with any beloved book, or any classical novel that so many people study in school,” Oliver says. “It’s their favourite book. That is the case for Emerald. This is her favourite book. She talked about this novel since the moment I met her.
“It means so much to so many people. So, of course, people are really protective over it. But I think what she’s done really well – and been quite clear about from the offset – is that it’s absolutely her version, her interpretation of it. The movie is her exploring what Wuthering Heights made her feel when she was 14, when she first read it.”
Alison Oliver at Spencer House in London, England. Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Hence Fennell’s decision to place inverted commas around the title. Indeed, she has argued that all adaptations should nest the source’s name in such quotation marks. What was Oliver’s own relationship to the text?
“I had actually picked it up when I was a teenager and didn’t finish it, which was silly,” she says. “But then I came back to it, weirdly, two or three years ago. I was doing Portia Coughlan, and I remember Marina Carr said Portia and Gabriel were like Cathy and Heathcliff. I thought I should read it again. And I was just so blown away by it. So when Emerald said she was going to make it I got so excited.”
The whirlwind continues, and Oliver seems happy to be swept up in its passage. She has recently settled into a new flat in the Kentish Town area of northwest London, but she knows the actor’s life could land her at any of the earth’s imagined corners.
Cinema? Stage? Telly?
“Both doing screen and theatre have their fearful parts,” she says. “I personally love rehearsing. I love getting into a room with people when it isn’t yet the finished product and messing around and playing.”
Home still beckons.
“I would love to come back sometime and do a play in the Abbey – that’s still my dream – or in the Gate. Hopefully soon. But nothing is planned. Nothing is planned.”
“Wuthering Heights” is in cinemas from Friday, February 13th