Welcome to Kingstown, Iris (Emma Laird).
Near the end of the second episode of Taylor Sheridan’s Paramount+ drama, Russian mobster Milo Sunter (Aidan Gillen) decides to change his approach and has Iris, a sex worker who’s been in New York, come to town to target Mike McLusky (Jeremy Renner). For her character, Mayor of Kingstown‘s Laird points to episodes from 5 on as “the sweet spot” for her. She tells us more.
Talk about Iris’ arrival in Kingstown.
Emma Laird: She really is a slow burn. She is an associate of the Russian mob. Her boss is Milo, played by Aidan Gillen, who is just the most wonderful man in real life. His character, not so much. He is in one of the prisons in Kingstown. Iris is working in New York as a sex worker and just sleeping with powerful men, turning judges [and] congressmen, to get them on the side of a criminal. Iris is his top girl and gets sent to Kingstown so that Milo can use her to his advantage again and fight with some guys in Kingstown to get what he wants.
[When] she comes to Kingstown, Iris has really created this false sense of reality for herself. That’s what we see in Episodes 2 to 4. A lot of my research was in trafficking because she’s trafficked, and her coping mechanism is that she’s pretending that it’s all fine. It’s very easy to get into a situation like that, where you feel like you have no other choice because they’re giving you security in the sense of money or a roof over your head. That’s how it kind of happened for Iris. What we see Episode 5 onwards is that world coming tumbling down and her facing the reality that she’s in because Kingstown has a way of really doing that and it breaks her and she can’t leave and she realizes the danger that she’s in. Kingstown is a very dangerous place with dangerous men, powerful men. It’s not the New York that she’s used to. We really see an incredibly devastating arc for her in this series. It was very, very hard to read, to research, to act. But I had a great crew of people around me to support me.
What can we expect from Mike and Iris?
Most of my scenes are with Jeremy. I think there’s one full episode where I’m not with him. And it was the best. He really guided me through a lot of this and was really there for me and patient with me as a first time actor, as a guy who’s done this for 20, 30 years.
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But in terms of Iris and Mike, there’s a frustration there, I think, because she’s used to every guy falling at her feet and her using this power, and she’s just never experienced a man like Mike before. She comes to Kingstown and it breaks her a little bit because she’s never had the experience of not being able to do her job so she’s never suffered the ramifications of what happens if she can’t do her job. That’s really what happens in Kingstown where she can’t get through to Mike. He sees right through it. And she then really gets into dangerous situations because of that. Episodes 9 and 10 and the progression that we see of their relationship in this series is something that I really love. It’s very flawed and broken and they’re both very broken people. And I think they see — he has these walls up and they really start to slowly break down. I don’t know what Jeremy would say, but I think that Mike slowly starts to like her a bit more. I think he just tolerates her and just feels the need to protect her, and then towards the end, it really is, “Oh, she’s human.” Their storyline is very special. I really love Iris and Mike.
Do they grow to trust each other?
Mike does not trust Iris at all. He thinks she’s venom. But I think Iris has always just gone with whatever’s safest for her and up until around Episode 5, Milo has provided that protection for her. Something happens at the end of Episode 5 which flips her perspective, and she goes to Mike. From that moment, from Episode 5, her loyalties are with Mike — without giving too much away — and she trusts him.
But I think with Mike, it’s a very slow burner because he knows her past. But I think ultimately he feels a need to protect her like he does with everyone in Kingstown and he feels a responsibility because things happen to her that he might’ve been able to stop or he’s made decisions that have caused bad things to happen to her. He’s got a good heart. I think he starts to trust towards the end, but for Iris, there was definitely a very distinct turning point where it was like, “Mike is the one that can protect me and no one else.” And she needs him. Mike doesn’t need Iris. He’s like, “another thing I’ve got to deal with.”
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Do we see Iris interacting with the rest of the McLusky family?
It’s such a shame because there really isn’t anyone else in the McLusky family that I get to interact with. I remember going to set and Dianne [Wiest, who plays matriarch Mariam] was just so motherly towards me and she was like, “How are you going to deal with it? Are you OK?” And Taylor Handley and Kyle Chandler [who play Mike’s brothers Kyle and Mitch] as well. Maybe in Season 2, though, I think something might come.
What else can you say about Iris?
She goes through a lot. It’s actually just changed me as a person emotionally, just having to delve into that world. She has the most awful situation that a woman can have. She really is an object in this world. When she realizes that’s the case, she then has to deal with all of that. She had a very troubled childhood and she’s just brushed everything under the rug and is coming out of really the worst situations. She’s reliving past traumas in Kingstown. She’s a girl who thought she was strong, who’s fending for herself in a place where there’s really powerful and dangerous man. And her only hope really is Mike.
In the trailer, we see say Kingstown tore her to pieces, and Mike tells her, not yet.
I know, it gets worse. It was harrowing. I’d get to set on certain days that we were shooting certain scenes, and the set was really quiet one day. I was like, are they shooting something? They’re like, “No, no, no, this is for you today.” Sometimes they put all the actors just in a tent together with your chairs, and they would give me my own and they would put little snacks and cushions in there, and they really, really made sure that it was safe and comfortable. It’s a very male-dominated set, but there was nothing wrong with that because I was in the hands of people that I trusted and Taylor’s writing was phenomenal. So I felt safe to perform the things that I was performing. I think if it was a set where I didn’t get treated the way that I was treated on this set, I would have not been able to do what I had to do. It was harrowing, but they made it as good as it could be.
It’s a very sensitive subject, the stuff that Iris goes through, and I really wanted to do it right. Of course those things are not actually happening to me physically, but I just wanted to make sure that I was doing it justice as a woman. And so it was hard to do because it felt real to me and it was traumatic and it was horrible. But I feel like the set that I was on couldn’t have been better for that situation.
Mayor of Kingstown, Sundays, Paramount+