Sarah’s initial interest in being a part of A Royal Night Out was sparked after reading the script. “I knew that it was a lovely story and it was just charming,” she says. “It was a charming romance.”

After accepting her leading role as the young Princess Elizabeth, researching it further and “really discovering Elizabeth; who she was, what the family had gone through during the war”, she realised a deeper connection. She says: “My grandmother is British and she fought in the women’s Auxiliary Air Force during World War Two. She met my grandfather during the war, because he was sailing for the British Navy, and they married and immigrated to Canada after World War Two. So there was also that personal connection to the story that made me really want to be a part of this film, to recreate that moment in time that they were both a part of.”

This isn’t the first time that Sarah has portrayed a real person – she also played Emma Jung in A Dangerous Method and Lady Elizabeth Murray in Belle. She believes that by portraying a real person, an actor takes on a lot of responsibility: “You want to do justice to their memory, to their character, to who they were, or who they are in this case. I think you feel this tremendous responsibility to do them justice and I know that really inspired me to work as hard as I could.”

Read the full article here on The National Student.