‘It’s so normalised’: Daisy Edgar-Jones says women shouldn’t have to feel afraid walking home at night

The 23-year-old actor stars in a new black-comedy thriller called Flesh

Daisy Edgar-Jones has said that women shouldn’t have to live with “anxieties” over their safety when it comes to dating and living their every day lives.

The Normal People star said in an interview for her new film, Fresh, that situations where women feel afraid, such as walking home late at night alone, are “so normalised”.

Edgar-Jones, 23, told Sky News that she was drawn the dark comedy thriller because it was a chance to “explore just the general anxieties of being a woman and dating and how much you try to put yourself out there and let your guard down, but also just the general sort of day-to-day fear that we experience”.

The film, which is the directorial debut of Mimi Cave, follows the lead character Noa (Edgar-Jones) as she tries to date people online, with disastrous results.

Sebastian Stan and Daisy Edgar-Jones in ‘Fresh' (Searchlight Pictures)

The actor added: “Even just walking home late at night – there’s a scene where Noa walks home with the key in her hand and we have to think about that, and it’s become so normalised that we don’t even really question how ridiculous it is that we live with those anxieties and we shouldn’t have to.”

The film comes after the first anniversary of the murder of Sarah Everard on 3 March. She was kidnapped, raped and murdered by serving Met officer Wayne Couzens as she walked home in south London last year.

Couzens was handed a whole-life term in September. This week, he was charged with four counts of indecent exposure, said to have taken place between January and February 2021.

Everard’s death sparked outrage and widespread concerns over women’s safety in the UK. Since March 2021, at least 125 women have been killed in the UK, according to the Counting Dead Women project, which records the names of women killed by men or where a man is the principle suspect.

Edgar-Jones said in her interview that much of the audience for true crime are women, which she thinks is because “we want to know if we were in that situation, how we’d react, because so often the victim is a woman”.