Cool America Live

Written by: Lindsey Vettorel/ Cool America Live

There’s a moment, early in our conversation, where Poppy Gilbert admits something that feels like the key to everything that follows.

She’s talking about Cecilia—the sharp, watchful antagonist she plays in Netflix’s My Oxford Year—and she says she knows this woman. Not as a villain, but as a type: the girl who seems cold, distant, already judging you before you open your mouth. The one who can tilt a room with a single raised eyebrow.

“I know those women,” she tells me. “I’ve seen those women—I’ve probably accidentally been those women.”

It’s said with a smile, but what she does next is why she’s so compelling on screen. Instead of stopping at the surface, she pushes further. “It’s always true that there’s something else going on, and that’s so much more important,” she says. Once you build the full human underneath, the coldness becomes a symptom, not the story.

In other words, Poppy doesn’t play “types.” She plays people.

Before Poppy was Cecilia or Barbie in Stay Close, she was a sixteen-year-old student with her nose in Pride and Prejudice. Like millions of readers, she fell for Elizabeth Bennet—but in the way you fall for a friend you feel you’ve secretly known your whole life.

“I felt I had such a private, personal relationship with Elizabeth Bennet,” she says. “I knew how her brain worked.” Essays, rereads, the strange intimacy of Austen’s narration—it all stitched Elizabeth into her interior life long before Poppy ever stepped in front of a camera.

When The Other Bennet Sister came along—a BBC adaptation of Janice Hadlow’s novel re-centering Mary Bennet—Poppy didn’t just get to play Elizabeth. She got to play her in the spaces Austen left blank. Not the famous scenes we all know, but the in-between moments: days in the Bennet household, private beats in Pemberley, the unseen edges of a character who has lived in her mind for a decade.

“I didn’t struggle to know how Elizabeth would react,” she says, almost apologetically. “I’ve known her for years. I care so deeply about her.”

It’s not bravado; it’s familiarity. The way you talk about a friend you’ve grown up with.

What’s striking about Poppy is how much of her work is about tension: warmth inside structures that aren’t built for it. A corseted body trying to relax. A confident woman navigating a world that mistakes self-possession for arrogance. A grieving young woman who looks like she’s judging you while she’s really just holding herself together.

On set for The Other Bennet Sister, something as simple as sitting on a sofa became a puzzle. “Being relaxed on a sofa then versus now is so different,” she laughs. Our version involves sweatpants, feet up, a spine shaped like a question mark. Elizabeth’s world does not.

“I had to show that she’s completely at peace with her sisters, unbothered by the outside world, but still period-accurate. You can’t slouch. You can’t throw your legs up. I was constantly fighting my instincts.”

It’s the same tightrope in her personality: a natural warmth that has to thread its way through rules and expectations, on screen and off. If Cecilia is wrapped in armour, Elizabeth is wrapped in stays—and Poppy is interested in what it costs to move inside both.

She admits she’s more comfortable in roles built on warmth. Playing the truly cold women, the ones in great distress, asks for a different kind of vulnerability. “There aren’t as many tricks,” she says. “You, the actor, are more exposed.”
That might be why she’s so good at making you think you’re watching one thing, while quietly building the opposite underneath.

Acting, the way Poppy does it, isn’t just about stepping into someone else. It’s about finding a safe exit.

She lights up when she talks about Florence Pugh’s description of Midsommar—flying away from the field where they shot, feeling like she was leaving her character behind in the worst moment of her life without saying goodbye. Poppy recognizes that feeling immediately.

“You have to welcome this person into your body and your heart,” she says. “And you also have to find a way to place them back down afterwards.” If she doesn’t, she knows exactly what will happen: she’ll burn bright and fast, then have nothing left.

So she collects small rituals: a simple stretch where she turns her head to each side, holds, breathes, imagines she’s resetting her vagus nerve. Maybe the science is fuzzy; the intention isn’t. It’s a way of telling herself, I’ve spent a lot of my emotional jug today. I need to be gentle now.

Add a packet of crisps and something sweet, and she can slowly reassemble herself.

Poppy grew up in motion—Stockholm, Singapore, a stop in Hong Kong, then London. She doesn’t romanticize it, but she understands what it built in her.

“You have to get good at making friends,” she says. You learn to listen more than you declare. To walk into a new cafeteria and ask, “Can I sit with you?” without dying of self-consciousness. You become a sponge rather than a fixed object.

It also means home, for her, isn’t a single place. It’s people. That lens is all over her life: in the way she talks about the fictional friendships that anchor characters like Cecilia, and in the real-world friendships that drag her out of low days.

One of those friends, Jenny, once called her out in a way that stuck. Poppy has a habit of admitting after the fact that she was struggling. “Why didn’t you call me when you were low?” Jenny asked. That question has become a quiet mantra. “It’s not a burden to need people,” Poppy says now. “Everyone likes feeling needed.”

You see Elizabeth Bennet in that moment, too,—the pride, the reluctance to ask for help, and then the slow realization that your own stubbornness might be getting in the way of your happiness.

Ask Poppy about locations, and you’ll get a story that sounds a little bit like a ghost tale and a little bit like a love letter.

On her first day at the estate doubling as Pemberley, she walked the grounds alone in costume, trying to convince her body that she wasn’t a London flat-dweller anymore—she was the lady of this house. She wanted to know how the hedges were cared for, which gardener did what, how the land breathed.

At the end of a long path, she turned around and really saw the house. It hit her in the chest: the scale, the responsibility, the reality of a young woman arriving there as Mrs. Darcy with no one to teach her how to be “the lady of the house” except the job itself.

“It totally influenced how I played the scene,” she says. She talked to the house. She talked to the gardens. She laughs at herself telling me this, but there’s no irony in it. For Poppy, the work is in letting the world talk back until it changes her.

If talking to Pemberley sounds a bit witchy, her approach to clothes is wonderfully practical.

Alongside fellow actor Cara Theobold, Poppy co-created The Hang Up Method—a styling practice built less on hauls and more on honesty. It doesn’t ask you to become someone else; it asks you to admit who you are.

“We never wanted it to be, ‘You can only work with us if you’re ready to spend loads of money,’” she explains. For years, before there was a business, she and Cara were already going through friends’ wardrobes, pulling out the pieces that made them light up and gently questioning the ones they’d bought because some trend demanded they should.

It’s a kind of narrative work: tracking patterns, editing, learning what belongs and what doesn’t. If one pair of jeans makes you feel fantastic, they’ll figure out why—the rise, the fabric, the cut—and build outfits around that instead of shaming you into buying the next “must-have.”

“Hailey Bieber looks fantastic because she’s well dressed for herself,” Poppy says. “You don’t have to dress like her to look like you.”

Sustainable fashion, in their hands, stops being homework and starts feeling like self-knowledge. They nudge clients toward resale platforms, new sustainable brands, and a little directory of labels they love, but the goal is simple: joy, not guilt. Clothes that feel like your insides, not somebody else’s mood board.

If you gave Poppy a blank page and a camera, she knows exactly what story she’d chase: a sports-based, female-led comedy-drama. She lights up describing it: a little Ted Lasso, a little Bend It Like Beckham, a lot of mud, sweat, and unflattering faces.

“I thought I was going to be a sports person,” she says. She’s still in awe of what team sports give girls—confidence, camaraderie, a place to be loud and messy and competitive without apology. A space where “strong” isn’t something you have to soften.

In a way, that’s the throughline of everything about her: the sports teams, the Bennet sisters, the eco-conscious closets, even her answer when I ask what the “cool” quality is that would define her in a story.

“I’m deeply uncool,” she jokes. She is not the aloof, detached kind of cool that looks good in sunglasses and never breaks a sweat. She’s the kind who laughs quickly, loudly, and often. The kind Amy Poehler has. The kind that makes you feel funnier, brighter, more interesting just because someone across from you is delighted to be there.

“People who are quick to laughter are more fun to be around,” she says simply. It’s the least strategic, most honest answer she could give.

When I ask her what she finds cool about America, she doesn’t hesitate: it’s the vastness. Not as a postcard cliché, but as a structural miracle.

“You have every possible climate, every view, every kind of person,” she says. “And it’s still one country.” The fact that fifty wildly different states have their own personalities and jurisdictions and still function as a single whole feels, to her, like an image worth stealing for storytelling.

“Vastness and contradiction, with unity somewhere in the middle,” she says. That’s America. It’s also Poppy’s work.

Cecilia and Elizabeth, corsets and denim, Regency parlours and sports pitches, sustainable fashion and emotional jugs, Pemberley and Depop. On paper, it shouldn’t all fit. In Poppy, it somehow does.

She doesn’t vanish into her characters. She doesn’t disappear into aesthetic. She brings her whole, inconsistent, funny, vulnerable self—and lets each new role rearrange the furniture just enough to reveal something we hadn’t seen before.

That’s her particular kind of cool: not a temperature, but a way of staying present. Of refusing to disappear, even when the job invites you to.