Krysty Wilson-Cairns

Krysty Norma Lesley Wilson-Cairns^[1] (born 26 May 1987) is a Scottish screenwriter. Born and raised in Glasgow, she studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the National Film and Television School. During her teenage years, she was a runner on television series including the detective show Taggart. Her script for the unproduced science fiction thriller Aether made the 2014 Black List and led to a staff writer role on the television show Penny Dreadful. Her feature film debut was the screenplay for the Sam Mendes-directed 2019 war film 1917. She co-wrote it with Mendes and received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Born	(1987-05-26) 26 May 1987 (age 37) Glasgow, Scotland
Occupation	Screenwriter
Education	Craigholme School Royal Conservatoire of Scotland National Film and Television School
Years active	2012–present

Early life and education

Wilson-Cairns was born on 26 May 1987^[2][3] in Glasgow, Scotland.^[4] She grew up in the Shawlands area of the city in a single-parent household. Wilson-Cairns attended the private Craigholme School. Her grandparents partly funded her place at the school.^[4] At the age of 15, she had a work experience placement on the Scottish detective show Taggart.^[5] The series had used the mechanic shop that her father worked in as a set and she reports watching the filming of it during her summer holidays.^[4][6] She became a runner on the show as well as on other television series including Rebus and Lip Service.^[7][8]

Wilson-Cairns had initially aspired to study physics and become an engineer but her on set experiences as a runner fostered her interest in working in the film industry.^[6] She studied Digital Film and Television at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS), and graduated in 2009.^[9] Her first creative work at the RCS was a short story about killer guinea pigs.^[4][10] She credits her ambition to become a screenwriter on being inspired by one of her lecturers at the RCS, screenwriter Richard Smith.^[11] She then spent a year working at the BBC Comedy Unit, before moving to London where she gained an MA in Screenwriting from the National Film and Television School (NFTS) in 2013.^[9][12] While studying at the NFTS, she worked as a bartender in The Toucan, an Irish pub in Soho, and developed script ideas during her downtime.^[13][14]

Career

Wilson-Cairns sold her first film script to FilmNation Entertainment in 2014.^[15] It was for the science fiction thriller project Aether, which provided her breakthrough after it made the top ten of the Black List.^[16][17][18] The script was read by screenwriter John Logan who hired her as a staff writer on his television show Penny Dreadful in 2015.^[9] She also contributed to its comic book series.^[19] After this, her first writing commission was for a potential film adaptation, to be directed by Tobias Lindholm, of Charles Graeber's non-fiction book The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder.^[20][21] Filmmaker Sam Mendes was impressed by her treatment, and suggested collaborating on a future film project.^[22] They had previously met while working on Penny Dreadful, for which he was an executive producer, and worked on two potential projects together.^[23] This included a film adaptation of Gay Talese's book The Voyeur's Motel and an Invisibilia podcast.^[24] However, both projects fell through due to licensing issues.^[25][26] In 2017, she was named as one of Forbes′ 30 under 30 in the Hollywood and Entertainment category.^[27]

Her feature film debut was the screenplay for Mendes' World War I film 1917 (2019) which she co-wrote.^[23] The film follows two young British soldiers on a mission to warn a fellow battalion of a German ambush, and is shot to appear as if it is one continuous take.^[28] To help develop the script, she travelled to the battlefields and cemeteries of World War I in northern France with her mother and read frontline diaries at the Imperial War Museum.^[4][29] For her work on the film, Wilson-Cairns received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay,^[30][31] and shared the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Film.^[32] She was named as one of the 10 Screenwriters to Watch by the trade magazine Variety in their 2019 list.^[33] In October 2020, she co-founded Great Company with producer Jack Ivins.^[1] The following year, the company signed a two-year film deal with Universal Pictures.^[34] She co-wrote the screenplay of Edgar Wright's psychological horror Last Night in Soho (2021), and had a cameo as a bartender.^[26][35] The following year, she wrote the screenplay for The Good Nurse, an adaptation of the Charles Graeber novel, which was first announced in 2014 as her first writing commission.^[36] The film was about the serial killer nurse Charles Cullen and intensive care nurse Amy Loughren who helped to convict him. Wilson-Cairns spent a fortnight working in a burns unit in a hospital in Connecticut to learn about the American healthcare system to develop the script.^[24] For her work on the film, she received a nomination for Best Writer Film/Television at the 2023 British Academy Scotland Awards.^[37]

Her upcoming projects include an adaptation of journalist Evan Ratliff's book The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal. about programmer-turned-drug cartel boss Paul Le Roux, for an Amazon Studios crime drama series.^[38][39] She is also writing the screenplay for a biopic on the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra directed by Denis Villeneuve, based on Stacy Schiff's biography Cleopatra: A Life.^[40]

Filmography

Film

Year	Title	Notes	Ref(s)
2019	1917	Co-written with Sam Mendes	[30][31][32]
2021	Last Night in Soho	Co-written with Edgar Wright	[35]
2022	The Good Nurse		[36][41]
2027	Untitled John Lennon biopic		[42]
	Untitled Paul McCartney biopic
	Untitled Ringo Starr biopic
	Untitled George Harrison biopic

Television

Year	Title	Role	Notes	Ref(s)
2016	Penny Dreadful	Writer	2 episodes: "No Beast So Fierce", "Perpetual Night" Also staff writer in season 3	[9][17][43]

Awards and nominations

Award	Date	Category	Work	Result	Ref(s)
Writers Guild of America Awards	1 February 2020	Best Original Screenplay	1917	Nominated	[31]
British Academy Film Awards	2 February 2020	Outstanding British Film	1917	Won	[32]
Academy Awards	9 February 2020	Best Original Screenplay	1917	Nominated	[30]
British Academy Scotland Awards	19 November 2023	Best Writer Film/Television	The Good Nurse	Nominated	[37]