Emily Carey, the star of Netflix’s new teen drama Geek Girl, knows how it feels to stick out as a kid. Aged nine, she made her West End debut as a baby ogre, covered in green prosthetics, in Shrek the Musical, and spent much of her childhood playing other “younger versions” of various characters, in Wonder Woman, Tomb Raider and House of the Dragon.
Her life was completely different to those of her classmates – and, teenage girls being teenage girls, they didn’t let her forget it. Playing Harriet Manners in Geek Girl, then – a 16-year-old for whom school bullying only gets worse when she’s scouted by a modelling agency on a field trip – was second nature. “It felt weirdly healing for my inner child,” Carey says, “because I went through a similar thing, and struggled to fit in in school.” And, she admits with a smile, “I’m a self-proclaimed geek.”
