Chance and Choice

Her great-grandfather is a giant among American playwrights. Her grandfather is a legend of the silver screen. Her mother is an acclaimed actress. Yet Oona Chaplin never felt fated to follow in their theatrical footsteps.

“I don’t know if I believe in fate,” she muses. “Certainly, a lot of children of doctors become doctors, and a lot of bankers have children who become bankers. I think the environment you grow up in exposes you to certain things. You can always escape from it. I chose to step in and it sort of chose me.”

American audiences began taking note of Chaplin when she played Talisa Stark, a healer trained in the medical arts, in the second season of HBO’s Game of Thrones. She received more attention this year as Zilpha Geary in FX’s Taboo, in which she played a conflicted married woman with passionate feelings for her half-brother.

Named for her maternal grandmother, the fourth and last wife of Charlie Chaplin (her great-grandfather was Eugene O’Neill; her mother is Geraldine Chaplin), Oona Chaplin honed her craft at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.

While her name should have opened doors, the native of Madrid (English is her third language, after Spanish and French), says it was not so. “Nepotism doesn’t really get you anywhere anymore,” she quips, “which I think is a terrible shame.”

Her famed grandfather died a decade before she was born, and her namesake grandmother died when Oona was five. She remembers only one meeting, during which she played with her grandmother’s Siamese cat. “He was called Silly Boy, and she said, ‘Be careful. He bites.’ It’s a very mysterious memory. I wonder why that stuck?”

If she could meet her grandfather today, Chaplin knows what she would do. “I would want to play. He knows how to play so well. I think the Little Tramp is a mischievous man, not a goody two-shoes. Everything comes from a place of love and tenderness, but it’s very non-judgmental. What I would want to do with him is play.”

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 4, 2017