On an overcast afternoon in mid-September, Isla Johnston, the 18-year-old star of Baz Luhrmann’s much-anticipated film based on the life of Joan of Arc, is wandering through The Met Cloisters. The museum—a 1930s amalgam of medieval monasteries and priories, transported from Europe to the far northern tip of Manhattan—is a fitting setting for her Vogue shoot. Luhrmann’s films are steeped in history and famous for thrilling atemporal digressions—Shakespeare’s Verona as a modern-day urban beachscape, raucous crowds in the Moulin Rouge stomping their feet to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Nevertheless, as Johnston enters a 12th-century structure, lifted from a Cistercian abbey south of Bordeaux, the veil of history descends: It’s a space that seems to reverberate with the murmurs of Benedictine monks, the light filtering through the arched-stone window as it might have a millennia ago.
Luhrmann’s Jehanne d’Arc movie (still untitled—and which he intends to begin shooting next year) will tell one of the unlikeliest of hallowed stories: that of a 17-year-old girl from the French village of Domrémy, possessed by divine voices and visions that instructed her to save France—at that time ensnarled in the conflict with England known as the Hundred Years’ War. Since 1420, France had been under the claim of the English Crown; the enfeebled 26-year-old French heir—the future Charles VII—was in retreat, broken, and insecure. Orléans, a strategic city, had been besieged; it was a teenage Joan who broke the blockade in 1429, creating a turning point in the conflict and allowing the French monarchy to eventually regain control. Charles VII, Luhrmann told me, had been about to flee. “If that happened, we’d all be eating English sarnies in France,” he explained. “There’d be no more baguettes. Can you imagine that devastating reality?”
The story of Joan of Arc has been told so many times it’s hard to imagine what is left to say. One could construct a history of film by merely studying the actors who have played her: Geraldine Farrar in Cecil B. DeMille’s Joan the Woman (1916), Maria Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Ingrid Bergman in Victor Fleming’s Joan of Arc (1948), Jean Seberg in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan (1957), Milla Jovovich in Luc Besson’s The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999). The story and myth inspired both Voltaire and Mark Twain; in Henry VI, Part 1, Shakespeare cast her as a shepherd’s daughter vaulted by divine inspiration (or insanity) above her rank and gender. In the closing moments of the 2024 Olympics, she galloped down the Seine on an illuminated, mechanical horse—an apparition who seemed to walk on water.
It is all quite a lot for a teenage actor to carry. But Luhrmann has a record of finding preternaturally able performers early in their careers as if with a divining rod: Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in Romeo + Juliet, Austin Butler in Elvis. For this film, he knew he wanted someone with considerable physical stamina to play the part. In Johnston, he also happened to find someone relatively unknown. “I feel blessed that we found her,” Luhrmann says.
Johnston grew up on a farm in southeastern England—“the middle of nowhere,” she says—where her family grew wheat, barley, rapeseed, and sugar beet. Her mother had worked as a model in New York before moving back to the UK and taking over the management of her husband’s family’s farmland in Suffolk. (Her father now works in IT.) Johnston and her younger brother grew up with cousins “going around the fields in the back of trucks,” she says. We’re sitting in one of the less glorious corners of the Cloisters, a break room where a security guard sips his afternoon tea nearby, and she’s telling me about riding ponies almost every day, straying into fields where she wasn’t supposed to be, and making a hasty escape from irate farmers.
Johnston knew quite early on that she was interested in something other than farmwork, although at the tiny school she attended (fewer than 20 students per year), acting or drama “wasn’t a thing.” It was a program for children called the Shakespeare Schools Theatre Festival that introduced her to the possibility of what might take place on a stage. (She played Lady Macbeth in her first production.) When she was eight, she went with her cousin to a Jurassic World audition, where filmmaker J.A. Bayona asked what she had done before. She told him she had been the donkey in the Nativity play. She did not get the role—but a casting director suggested to her mother that she might want to look into getting an agent.
She went to more auditions after that and got a few small roles, but her life really changed at 11, when she earned a role of Beth Harmon in the Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit, a volatile orphan who is also a chess genius (the adult version of Beth would be played by Anya Taylor-Joy). “I was so new to all of it,” Johnston says. “They were like, ‘Do you want a wig or do you want to cut your hair?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, cut it. It’s fine. It’ll grow back. Let’s go ginger.’ And then I was ginger for four years after that.” She started a new school with her odd haircut. “Everyone was like, Wow, she’s weird.” It didn’t help when her mom would step in to explain that it was for an as-yet-unreleased show about chess.
When the show came out and became a phenomenon, invitations to audition started arriving so rapidly that Johnston felt slightly alarmed by the whole endeavor. She asked her agent to politely decline them all, and turned her focus back to school. She loved her classes, especially history. She thought she might want to be an archeologist, and completed her A levels in drama, art history, and history earlier this year. “Got an A star in drama, by the way,” she says with a wink. But she also decided that she missed acting and wanted to give herself two years to really give it her full attention. “It’s taken me quite a long time to work out that this is something I want to do,” she says. And then the opportunity to audition for Joan came along.
Luhrmann’s auditions were unlike anything Johnston had participated in before. Early in the process the filmmaker had them read parts of Saint Joan, the classic George Bernard Shaw play—but also a monologue from Fleabag. “The Shaw was very classical and what people expect,” Luhrmann says, “and the idea was to flip it and give some material that was completely contemporary.”
Luhrmann knew he couldn’t cast someone terrified of horses—and the actor would need a bearing that could accommodate armor. (He knew what that was like, having tried armor on at the Royal Armouries museum in Leeds.) He also wanted to emphasize that Joan was a teenage girl—not even from an elevated rank—who plunged herself into a brutal battle. “I’ve had a teenage daughter,” Luhrmann says, and “there’s a certain chemical energy. She could lift you up and cut you down with her tongue the next moment.”
To help him capture that audacity, he worked on the screenplay with Ava Pickett, the 31-year-old playwright and screenwriter whose play 1536 imagines the reverberations of the execution of Anne Boleyn among ordinary young women, and was staged at London’s Almeida Theatre earlier this year. “The thing that we really bonded over was Jehanne d’Arc the teenage girl, rather than Jehanne d’Arc the cultural icon or the legend,” says Pickett. That thematic emphasis didn’t mean that Pickett and Luhrmann were playing fast and loose with history. They consulted with academics, and Luhrmann says that he’s “taken every step that Jehanne d’Arc has ever taken in France.” Catherine Martin, Luhrmann’s wife and frequent collaborator, describes to me compiling an “encyclopedic study” of the period that ranges from “the breeds of dogs popular in her era, to comparative studies of medieval and modern horses, to furniture, textiles, and even details of interior painting.” (Martin, whose mother is French and father is a retired academic specializing in French history, also points to one reason Joan might have dressed herself in male clothing: It was tied together with laces, which made it “far more difficult to undress someone against their will.”)
Pickett also traveled with Luhrmann to Paris and Rouen, where Joan was eventually burned at the stake—“to look at the sky and have it be the same sky that she would’ve looked at,” she says—and finally the two spent weeks writing together on Australia’s Gold Coast. At the end, Pickett read him the entire script out loud.
When Johnston walked into the final workshop auditions at the Chiltern Firehouse in London—shuttered because of a fire, but reconstructed enough to offer a quiet, empty place for Luhrmann to bring in actors—she was almost immediately able to tap into the rarified, teenage indignation, that belief she had that “she has the answers,” says Pickett. It was incredible, Pickett says, “to see her just drive the car. She stole it. She just took these scenes, and just went with them.”
When Johnston thinks about the filming to come, “obviously, there’s the physical challenges—the fighting and the riding,” she says to me, “but I can learn that and I can work on that.” The thing that intimidates and excites her is the story’s improbability. When she was in school, she tells me, her peers thought about Joan of Arc the way they thought about Robin Hood—someone so unlikely that she must have been made up. “No one in history quite knows how she did what she did.”
“She saved France,” Luhrmann says, and inspired a king. “You could pretty much say that’s the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of Renaissance.”
It will undoubtedly mark a seismic shift for Johnston as well, when the film, produced with Warner Bros., which also worked with Luhrmann on The Great Gatsby and Elvis, comes out. Other worlds, including fashion, are already opening their doors. She’s impressed the designers of Loewe, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, who cast her in their SS26 collection teaser campaign, and who wrote in by email: “We had the chance to meet Isla at the end of July. She embodies the spirit of new beginnings—there is a freshness and quiet strength to her presence that feels hopeful and full of possibility.” This week’s agenda, Johnston’s first trip to America, is about staying grounded: She’ll let her mother, who is with her, point out haunts from her modeling years. They will squeeze in visits to The Museum of Modern Art, The Frick, and as many art galleries as possible.
Luhrmann has also arranged a tour of the medieval armory at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “We have so many amazing doors to open,” Luhrmann says, reflecting on the journey ahead of them. “I can take you to the door. I can open it up for you. But you have to go inside.”
In this story: hair, Shay Ashual; makeup, Mark Carrasquillo; manicurist, Deborah Lippmann; tailor, Lucy Falck.
Director of Photography: Kenny Suleimanagich. Assistant Camera: Liam Lawlor.
Special thanks to Bazmark: Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Schuyler Weiss, Fletcher Donohue, Jack Flynn, Chris Tangney, A’mi Gray, and MJ Coy.
Location: The Met Cloisters.
Produced by Boom Productions Inc.
