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[on celebrating her Oscar nomination during lockdown] I heard the news and I was so shaky, and then I just got to hold my sister’s hand all night and talk to my best friends. I got to experience it from such a calm place and I’m just feeling deeply grateful.
• Vanessa Kirby, Porter Magazine April 2021
I just so happen to be in a job that is in a public medium, and I’m grateful for that, because it’s lovely to tell a story that you really care about, and to have other people share it with you. But the public nature of it is strange and sort of random, because I don’t feel that what I do is any more important than anyone else. It’s not because I’m more interesting than the next person doing something that they love and care about. [...] I remember getting my first paycheck – it was like a lightning bolt for me, walking from the theater in Bolton back to my flat. It’s just the biggest blessing to do something you truly love with your day. I wake up feeling that, and I go to sleep feeling that, so, in some ways, I still feel like that girl walking home from the theater.
• Vanessa Kirby, Porter Magazine April 2021
One of my first questions will always be, ‘Is this something that scares me?’ A lot of movies have these very neatly drawn female archetypes who are a film version of women, and that’s not what I identify with. From my experience of being a woman in the world, I know that you have to be an agent of that change. I know how wonderful it felt for me to have that space on a set, and now to be creating a company where I can continue to make those choices.
• Vanessa Kirby, Porter Magazine April 2021
Claire [Foy] asked me, ‘Do you feel really empowered on this?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, I actually feel like I have space to do the work I’ve always wanted to do.’ She said the same, and we realized that [it was because] we were the protagonists of our own story. It was that [moment] which illuminated the number of times when you were in [projects] where you were saying things that only helped the psychological journey and the narrative of the male characters.
• Vanessa Kirby, Porter Magazine April 2021
I was just about to move out to live on my own in north London – my God, I would have been so lonely! My sister saved me. It was so nice to have routines together. We were trying to take a bit of exercise, cooking together, watching films that made us feel better, drinking wine on Friday nights. [...] It’s funny when everything in your life closes down, and you have to sit with yourself, and you suddenly notice all the things you have and you’re grateful for. I hope that feeling never goes away – I will never underestimate how lucky I am.
• Vanessa Kirby, Harper’s Bazaar UK March 2021
I was watching the mother go through these contractions, which were excruciating, and the pushing, and then there was a moment of calm, and of expansion. And so, when I’m going through things in my life, I say to myself, this is like a contraction, surrender to it, because there might be something born from it. Sometimes we don’t want that; when we’re feeling something horrible, we want it to pass as far as possible. I’m teaching myself to allow it to be there and not resist or push it away, and that’s because of that woman.
• Vanessa Kirby, Harper’s Bazaar UK March 2021
It was one woman’s voice, like an echo from the past, and we’ll never know who she was. The World to Come really educated me about what life was like for women not that long ago. They didn’t have a choice about anything they did with their time. You were owned by the house, and the man, and you had no freedom outside that. The best thing about doing this mad job sometimes is having your ignorance illuminated. I gravitate towards things that push beyond my experience, I want to go to places I don’t know, I’m not familiar with.
• Vanessa Kirby, Harper’s Bazaar UK March 2021
Normally, it’s so hard to forget there are machines in your face, but I had no idea that a camera was even there. The first time we shot it, I was literally sobbing for 10 minutes afterwards. I couldn’t get out of it. My brain was telling me it wasn’t real, but my unconscious didn’t know the difference, especially with having a real baby in my arms. Kornel came over onto the bed and held me so tight. He didn’t let go of me for five minutes, and he said, 'Just remember this feeling.' That really helped me for the rest of the movie, when the character doesn’t express anything, but almost has to be doing the howling without speaking a word.
• Vanessa Kirby, Harper’s Bazaar UK March 2021
