Finding Emily Cast Guide: Who Plays Owen, Emily Raine and the Other Emilys?

“Finding Emily” has a cast list that is deliberately confusing at first glance because Emily is not just one character. Spike Fearn plays Owen, the musician whose search begins after a girl named Emily gives him a phone number with one digit missing. Sadie Soverall plays that first mysterious Emily, while Angourie Rice stars as Emily Raine, the psychology student who joins Owen’s search and gradually becomes much more important to him than his original target. Minnie Driver, Prasanna Puwanarajah, Amber Grappy, Nadia Parkes and a long list of actresses playing other Emilys fill out Alicia MacDonald’s Manchester-set romantic comedy.

Angourie Rice as Emily Raine

Angourie Rice plays Emily Raine, an American psychology student studying at the fictional Manchester City University. Emily is working on a thesis that questions romantic attachment and sees Owen’s extreme determination to locate a woman he met once as an unusually convenient case study. She offers to help him track down the missing Emily without initially being transparent about how useful his behavior is to her research.

That premise gives Rice the more complicated half of the central pairing. Owen openly believes that one perfect connection can mean something enormous, while Emily is trying to prove that romantic attachment can make people irrational and self-destructive. The obvious problem is that spending so much time studying Owen makes it increasingly difficult for her to stay academically detached.

Rice has already built a wide-ranging career despite being one of the younger leads in the movie. She played Siobhan Sheehan opposite Kate Winslet in HBO’s “Mare of Easttown,” appeared as Betty Brant in the MCU “Spider-Man” films and starred as Cady Heron in the 2024 film adaptation of “Mean Girls.” Her other credits include “The Nice Guys,” “The Beguiled,” “Honor Society” and “The Last Thing He Told Me.”

Spike Fearn as Owen

Spike Fearn plays Owen, a musician and sound engineer working around the university’s student-union scene. He meets a girl dressed as a fairy during a night out, becomes convinced their connection could be something special and wakes up to discover that her phone number is missing a digit. Instead of treating that as the universe telling him to move on, Owen decides to find her.

His search becomes progressively larger. Owen contacts hundreds of students named Emily, attracts attention online and eventually turns himself into a campus talking point. That gives Fearn a role built equally around romantic sincerity and secondhand embarrassment. The performance works because Owen cannot become so ridiculous that viewers stop wanting him to find some kind of happy ending.

Fearn is best known internationally for playing Bjorn in “Alien: Romulus.” He also appeared in Charlotte Wells’ acclaimed “Aftersun” and the television series “The Responder,” and later joined James L. Brooks’ “Ella McCay.” Focus Features singled him out alongside Rice when announcing the project in 2024.

Sadie Soverall as Fairy Emily

Sadie Soverall plays the woman who starts the whole mess. She is credited as Fairy Emily, reflecting the costume she is wearing when Owen meets her during the student party.

Fairy Emily and Owen connect quickly, but the incomplete phone number turns her into an idea almost as much as a person. Owen spends so much time imagining what finding her could mean that the search becomes larger than their actual meeting. That is precisely why Emily Raine finds him such an appealing psychology subject.

Soverall is familiar from Netflix’s “Fate: The Winx Saga,” in which she played Beatrix, and from Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn,” where she appeared as Annabel. “Finding Emily” gives her less screen time than Rice, but without Fairy Emily there is no hunt, no case study and no central romance.

Minnie Driver as Dean Watkinson

Minnie Driver plays Dean Watkinson, the university administrator forced to deal with the increasingly public consequences of Owen’s romantic campaign. As his search goes viral and students begin questioning his mass email to women named Emily, what started as one student’s private problem becomes a public-relations headache for the university.

Driver needs little introduction after a career spanning film and television. She earned an Academy Award nomination for “Good Will Hunting” and has starred in “Circle of Friends,” “Grosse Pointe Blank,” “The Riches,” “Speechless” and numerous other projects. Her Dean Watkinson is intentionally broader than the two leads, giving the movie an authority figure who can react to the increasingly absurd campus spectacle.

Related: Where was Finding Emily Filmed?

It is a relatively small role, but an effective one. Owen believes he is pursuing a grand romantic gesture. Dean Watkinson has to deal with what that gesture looks like once hundreds of students receive unsolicited emails.

Prasanna Puwanarajah as Professor Westlake

Prasanna Puwanarajah plays Professor Westlake, the academic connected to Emily Raine’s psychology research. Emily believes Owen can strengthen her thesis about romantic attachment, which means Westlake becomes part of the academic pressure driving her decision to keep studying him.

Puwanarajah has an extensive British television and stage career. His credits include “The Crown,” “Patrick Melrose,” “Doctor Foster” and “Ten Percent,” while he has also worked as a director and writer. In “Finding Emily,” his character gives Emily something Owen does not have: a concrete professional reason to keep the search going even when the arrangement begins becoming emotionally messy.

Owen’s Friends and Family

Jack Riddiford plays Matt, Owen’s older brother, while Isabella Laughland portrays Freya. Reviews of the movie establish that Owen lives with Matt and Freya in the family home, which still carries memories of Owen and Matt’s late mother.

That home life gives Owen a little more context than simply being “the guy looking for Emily.” His romantic fixation arrives during a period when other parts of his life, including his music, are unsettled.

The supporting student ensemble includes Amber Grappy as Rhea, Nadia Parkes as Laura Lewis, Cora Kirk as Anna, Anthony J. Abraham as Kyle, Timothy Innes as Tristan and Ella Maisy Purvis as Meg.

Their presence helps make the university feel like an actual social ecosystem rather than a stage occupied only by Owen and Emily.

Why Are There So Many Emilys?

Because Owen has only a first name and an incomplete phone number, his search leads him through a ridiculous number of women who happen to be named Emily. That becomes one of the movie’s recurring jokes and explains some unusual cast credits.

Along with Rice’s Emily Raine and Soverall’s Fairy Emily, the cast includes Yali Topol Margalith as Emily Palmer, Kat Ronney as Emily Thewlis, Julia Rogers as Emily Weston, Yasmin Paige as Emily Hassan, Herin Seo as Emily Hwang and Sibusisiwe Nyoni as Emily Traore, among several others.

It is more than a casting gimmick. The endless Emilys gradually expose the problem with Owen’s original idea of romance. He thinks he is searching for one perfect person based on a single encounter, while the woman actually getting to know him is standing beside him throughout the hunt.

That is why Rice and Fearn remain the real center of “Finding Emily.” Soverall’s character supplies the mystery, but Emily Raine and Owen supply the relationship. The supporting cast then turns their private experiment into a full campus spectacle, which is exactly where the movie finds most of its comedy.