Emily Browning: Real life affects film roles

Actress Emily Browning is glad she finished her studies before pursuing film, as she feels many stars in Hollywood don't understand life outside the industry.

The 26-year-old's career has gone from strength to strength over the years and she can currently be seen on the big screen as Frances Shea in the Kray Twins biopic Legend. Her big break came as Violet opposite Jim Carrey in 2004's Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, and it marked her first taste of La La Land.

"I was here (in Los Angeles) for nine months and I took that time off school," she recalled to Interview magazine. "When I first came here, I was thinking, 'Maybe I'll leave school and just work with a tutor. I'll finish high school through correspondence and stay in LA and keep working,' and then it became apparent very quickly that I really was missing that high-school experience.

"I'm so glad that I had the foresight to do that at the time, because I saw a lot of people in Los Angeles whose lives were the film industry - they were brought up in the film industry - and they didn't really have a proper understanding of how the world worked outside of the film industry."

In Emily's eyes, her job is to bring human beings and experiences to life, and she reasons she can't do that if she hasn't had a real life away from her work.

In Legend she plays the young and troubled wife of notorious London gangster Reggie Kray, who along with his brother Ronnie got involved in countless crimes in the big smoke in the '60s. Tom Hardy portrays both the brothers in the movie, which made shooting an interesting process.

"We would do a lot more than two takes, but we would shoot with Tom as Reggie usually in the morning and then he would change into his Ron costume and his Ron hair and make-up and we would shoot it again from the top," Emily explained.