Nell Tiger Free doesn’t scare easily: “‘The First Omen’ was so much fun”

Nell Tiger Free, star of the upcoming Omen prequel The First Omen, is not new to the world of the supernatural. She’s been fascinated by all things paranormal since the age of three, when she was bullied by a ghost.

She used to sleep in a small attic room, because it was next to her sister’s bedroom and she insisted on being close to her. She was, she believes, not the room’s only resident. “Apparently, I used to come down to my mum’s bedroom and say, ‘Mum, the lady with the hairbrush is back and she keeps hitting me’,” says Free. All quite odd, but easily explained away as the active imagination of a child. Until a stranger came to the house asking if she could come in and see her sister’s old bedroom, the room she’d slept in shortly before she died. “Mum let her in and this woman headed upstairs and kept going until she got to the attic room. My mum said, ‘This is where she slept?’ ‘Yes, she always loved this room’. So my mum asked, ‘Did she by any chance have a silver hairbrush?’ ‘Yes, she absolutely did!’ ‘Yeah, I think she’s been hitting my kid’.”

Most people telling this story would probably be at least a little freaked out. Not Free. Her eyes are wide with excitement. As she gesticulates wildly, the many heavy, skull-based rings on her fingers clack happily. “Why would I be scared?” she asks. “I’m not scared at all. It gives me some level of comfort.” She has never been one to run away when faced with something frightening, whether in the real world or the spirit realm.

The First Omen tested Free on both fronts. It’s her first lead in a studio movie and it was a shoot full of apparently sinister goings on. Set before the events of the 1976 horror classic The Omen, about a couple who discover their son is the antichrist, this movie has Free as Margaret, a young woman who has devoted her life to the church but isn’t 100 per cent certain in her faith. When she goes to Rome to become a nun, that faith is violently shaken by the discovery of a conspiracy happening in the church. You can probably guess what they’re conspiring to do, or who to bring about.

We’re meeting in a cafe in the grounds of Fulham Palace. It’s all very chichi and artisanal teabags, but we’re just a short terrified dash from one of the key locations from The Omen, All Saints’ Church, where the unfortunate Father Brennan was impaled by the church spire. “I know, I’ll have to have a look!” says Free, again unbothered by anything creepy (your brave writer gave it a very wide berth). Something of a horror obsessive, Free was well aware of the film before reading the script for The First Omen. She says she was “dubious” about the possibility of a prequel, “because how can you?… But then I read the script and was like, ‘OK, get me involved’.”

She calls the shoot, with debut feature director Arkasha Stevenson, “so much fun”, but also full of unsettling moments. She can barely wait to get them out. “Everybody’s plane – everybody’s – was struck by lightning,” she says. One actor was attacked by a flock of crows the day before shooting. Something knocked on her door in the middle of the night then disappeared. Her co-star Ralph Ineson’s crucifix snapped in half for no apparent reason while he and Free were talking (he plays the young Father Brennan). “There was a lot of crazy shit happening,” she says. Crazy shit has been happening to Free for a long time.

Free’s introduction to the acting industry was simultaneously lucky and brutal. She grew up in Hampton Wick, a leafy middle-class area of southwest London, attending Teddington School, whose past alumni include Keira Knightley (“people would write her name in the school textbooks and pretend it was the one she’d used”). She had no great ambitions to act but she attended a dance and drama Saturday class, mostly “because I had too much energy and drove my mother to madness, so she needed a way for me to burn it off.”

On one of these Saturdays, when she was 11, a casting director stopped by looking for potential future stars and alighted on Free. She was excited, but her first experience was a tough lesson in how unkind the industry can be. “My first proper audition was for this film [Broken] and it was for the lead,” she says. “I went through about six months of auditions with [the director, Rufus Norris]. I was doing workshops and stuff, and it got to the point where there were no other girls in the running… I got told I was going to be given the part and I was so excited. I couldn’t believe it. Then at the last minute, everything changed. He found another girl and cast her. It broke my heart.”

Free wound up appearing in the film, in a much smaller role, but it was an upsetting introduction. “I would cry my eyes out every time I went home [after shooting].” When she finally saw the film, most of her role had been cut. She’s sanguine about it now – “I don’t blame anyone; it’s just the business” – but the experience was rough enough that her mother sat her down to make sure she understood that things like this would probably happen again and she should think hard about whether she wanted to continue. She did. “I’m a stubborn little shit,” she laughs. “I was convinced I could have done that movie and done it really well. I really believed that at the time, so I thought I had to at least do something. So I kept doing it and am still doing it.”

“I try to be honest about the hard experiences… it’s important to have a level of transparency”

For the rest of her childhood, her mum set the rule of one job per year (“which she didn’t really need to enforce because I only got hired once a year”). Those jobs included kids’ show Mr. Stink with Hugh Bonneville and Sheridan Smith; the small role of the ill-fated Myrcella Baratheon in Game Of Thrones; and in 2019, roles in two high profile TV shows that proved formative in very different ways.

The first was a supporting role in Too Old To Die Young, a TV series by Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn. She calls the role “my first adult job”, as the 17-year-old girlfriend of an unhappy cop (Miles Teller) mixed up in all sorts of underworld misery. It’s a very violent series and Free’s character is put through a lot. “It was my first sex scenes, my first swearing on camera, drugs – all that,” she says. “I felt frightfully grown-up and quite bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when I went into it. When I came out of it, I felt like I had aged a decade.” Asked why, she starts and stops repeatedly, weighing up how to put it. It was not an enjoyable shoot. She calls Winding Refn “a particular man with particular ideas” but prefers not to elaborate too deeply. “It was an experience that taught me a lot and toughened me up,” she says. “It made everything after feel a lot easier, because it was a very difficult show and a very difficult shoot for me. It’s probably not something I would revisit.”

She thinks it’s important to speak about experiences she didn’t enjoy. “My biggest thing is to try to be as honest as possible without getting myself into trouble,” she says. “I try to be honest about the hard experiences, especially with other young actors and people in the industry who may work with people you’ve worked with in the past. I think it’s important to have a level of transparency.”

The second 2019 show was far more positive. In Servant, an Apple TV+ show that ran for four seasons, she played the very spooky nanny hired by a troubled Philadelphia couple who are struggling to cope with the loss of their son to such a degree that they’ve acquired a doll to replace him. “I can’t say enough about what that experience meant to me,” she says. She praises its creator, M. Night Shyamalan, and all her castmates, but says she was “obsessed” with the show’s other female lead, Lauren Ambrose (also known for Six Feet Under and Yellowjackets). “She helped me massively,” says Free. “She taught me a really important reason: vanity will kill you as an actress… I’m insecure as hell – that’s why I’m in this job – and I remember [in Servant] they’d shoot me from these crazy angles and I’d think, ‘Well, I need a nose job’… And Lauren was like, ‘This is being shot by M. Night Shyamalan. It’s for a reason. Get out of your head’… If I hadn’t learned that then I couldn’t have played Margaret, because there was no place for vanity in this role.” We’re only able to watch a brief amount of footage of The First Omen before meeting Free, but she hints that there are gruesome trials in store for Margaret.

She was in Servant from the ages of 19-23 and describes it as “like my uni”. That would make The First Omen effectively her graduation role, the one that really announces her to the world. While Servant was a hit for Apple, viewership is still relatively modest compared to other streamers (Apple doesn’t release exact figures but it has an estimated 25million subscribers compared to Netflix’s 247million and Prime Video’s 220million). The First Omen will put her in front of far more people. She’s relaxed about it. “After I did my first proper job [on Mr. Stink, when she was 12] I thought I wasn’t going to be able to leave my house,” she laughs. “I was going to be hounded, blinded by paparazzi. This was it, I was a superstar. And then everything just stayed the same. And I have experienced that feeling every time since.” We’ll see.

“I think I’ve got quite a creepy disposition”

There is actually one thing that scares Free: romance. Not in her real life; she’s in a relationship so secure she has his name tattooed on her body. But having to pretend to be romantic. Thinking about what might come next, she says “give me possession or a murder or broken bones and I’m fine. Give me a romantic scene and I’m squeamish.” She’d like to do a romantic comedy, “but I’m quite a fumbling, gangly little creature… I think I’ve got quite a creepy disposition.”

She doesn’t, despite the films she gravitates towards. She might be decorated in crosses – a tattoo on her finger, a marker of her Servant experience, and Margaret’s crucifix around her neck – but she doesn’t give off any darkness. She’s chatty and light and endearingly dorky about her passions. Another tattoo, on her upper arm, is the Foo Fighters logo, “because I’m completely obsessed”.

It’s not hard to picture her in anything from action to rom-com to musical (she can sing, and released two songs with her now disbanded group We Are Your Parents) to Jane Austen adaptation. She seems like someone who could take on anything. And whatever the future brings, God help anyone who tries to get in her way.

NME has contacted Nicolas Winding Refn and Rufus Norris for comment on their respective time working with Nell Tiger Free.

‘The First Omen’ is in cinemas from April 5

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