Esmé Creed-Miles Is the Action Hero We Need Today

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Being a teenager is awkward enough without having to grow up isolated in the forest, hunted by a relentless CIA agent—which is what the titular character, played by Esmé Creed-Miles, is faced with in Amazon Prime’s new series Hanna. Based on the 2011 film starring a young Saoirse Ronan and Eric Bana, the show follows Hanna, an extraordinary girl who journeys out of her father’s (here portrayed by Joel Kinnaman) secluded sanctuary deep in the Polish woods to find the truth about her past. Each step of the way, she must avoid capture by Marissa Weigler, played by Mireille Enos, whose sinister background with the CIA starts to catch up with her. Having starred in only a handful of small independent films beforehand, the nineteen-year-old Creed-Miles makes an impressive television début in Hanna, firmly taking her place in the public eye. Throughout the series, she gracefully approaches the character and all its challenges, showing the complex nature of a lost girl with killer instincts. While she is still surprised—and thankful—that she got the role, it is quickly obvious that Creed-Miles was the perfect choice to lead this action remake.

As a curious teenager, Hanna longs to experience life outside of her father Erik’s strict routine of hunting, combat training, and language studies. When she presses him to tell her more about her deceased mother Johanna and his life before the forest, Erik dismisses her questions with vague explanations, causing Hanna to become increasingly impatient. Itching to find the answers herself, she decides to venture out beyond the marked safe zone, accidentally alerting the CIA to her and Erik’s whereabouts. Unable to stop the danger at hand, Erik reluctantly sets his plan in motion to help give Hanna a normal life, which centers around killing Marissa, the CIA operative who has been chasing Hanna since she was an infant fifteen years ago.

With this danger in mind, Erik and Hanna set out to turn the hunter into the hunted, but tensions between them rise as Hanna starts to uncover the whole truth, filling in the gaps of her father’s story. The show is undeniably high-octane, with Hanna constantly fending off swarms of CIA agents with her animal-like instincts and needle-like precision, but what grounds the action is the relationship between father and daughter. Erik teaches Hanna everything he knows in order to keep her alive and on the run, but forgets to show her what makes life worth living. Her drive to discover this for herself shows where her true strength lies. Despite all the fear and violence that surrounds her, Hanna still strives to create a fulfilling, happy life and teaches herself what her father could not.

From beginning to end, the physical and emotional demands of Hanna had Creed-Miles working tirelessly. Before filming even began, she went through two months of extensive physical training. “I did martial arts, boxing, flexibility training, yoga—all of it,” she giggles trying to remember the long list of activities. For an action role, this kind of prep work was to be expected, but what surprised Creed-Miles was the intensity during the filming process. “You continually have to put in extra hours of work and effort when you’re not even on camera,” she elaborates, “like rehearsing for fight scenes and maintaining your fitness level throughout the shoot.” However, the challenge was a welcome one which the Londoner met with full force, as it helped her get into character and feel out the many fast-paced action scenes the show has to offer.

While the series showcases many of Hanna’s lethal abilities, her coming-of-age story is one to which Creed-Miles thinks many viewers will be able to relate, reflecting that her “pursuit of agency and desire to remove herself from the claustrophobic environment she grew up in” are what lie at the heart of the character. Even though she is in constant danger of being captured or killed, Hanna is still driven to share in new experiences with the people she meets along the way on her journey to self-discovery, including Sophie, played by Rhianne Barreto, who meets Hanna during a family vacation in Morocco. Sophie is a product of modern culture and often underscores the quirks Hanna has acquired due to her isolated upbringing. However, it is their similarities and shared joy over common teenage experiences like dancing and flirting with boys that grounds their relationship and spotlights a new side of Hanna: her youthfulness. This emotional beat, as Creed-Miles describes it, came more naturally to her than others, such as Hanna’s struggle with “betrayal and loss of identity,” which places her in strange circumstances that are so outside the realm of everyday life that they are almost unimaginable. Still, Creed-Miles approaches these moments with such raw power that it is not difficult to become completely engrossed in Hanna’s reality.

To access that emotional authenticity, Creed-Miles avoided drawing inspiration from the original film and didn’t watch it until much later. “I just tried to stay true to my own interpretations and hoped that I did a good job,” she relates. This focused approach to the role kept the fear of comparison to a three-time Oscar nominee completely out of her mind. “I didn’t find it challenging to take on an established character because that’s how film and television have always worked,” she says. “Things are constantly being remade, especially in theaters, so it wasn’t something that concerned me.” Having personally enjoyed the film, Creed-Miles acknowledges that the series builds off of its strengths. “People try to take narratives and turn them into television when there isn’t enough meat to the story. I see a lot of TV where I just get bored because they’re trying to take a story and elongate it,” she says. “The great thing about Hanna was that there were so many elements to the plot that it just gave us so much room to explore and really let a moment breathe without trying too hard. We didn’t need to worry about overdoing anything because our [screenwriter David Farr’s] writing was so rich. There were so many subplots, characters, and thrilling moments to explore that it never felt like we were overdoing it or carrying the same beats over and over again.”

Although season one of Hanna is now out, Creed-Miles does not plan on slowing down anytime soon. Many of her aspirations for future projects involve moving behind the camera. She actively writes stories and screenplays in her own time, but the one passion that sticks out for her is photography, which she studied at university, discovering that she really enjoyed working in the darkroom. Unsurprisingly for someone who always seems to be digging deeper, her interest in photography goes beyond the easy pleasure of taking a snapshot. “I’m interested in doing staged conceptual photography for film pieces, so not like street photography or portraiture, but using photography as a medium in order to create a work, like one might a painting,” she says. “I picture myself more as a painterly photographer rather than a traditional one because I’m not taking my camera out with me to capture something in a candid fashion. I’m more so using it like I would a paintbrush, to create an image or to orchestrate a scene.”

With so many interests at hand, it is intriguing to imagine what Creed-Miles’s future has in store for her. But as for right now, she is just grateful to be in the position in which she’s found herself: “I’m trying to give Hanna my everything because I really think it’s something worth getting excited about.” The series offers a story that masterfully balances gripping action with tender heartache, with Creed-Miles at the center of it all. As Hanna, she breathes new life into the action genre by embodying a powerful female lead whose vulnerability and longing only enhance her strength. Empowering and thoughtful, Creed-Miles’s performance leaves a mark long after the series is finished.

Hanna is now streaming on Amazon Prime.