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 privateCraigholme 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]
^ abcNordyke, Kimberly; Konerman, Jennifer; Strause, Jackie; Howard, Annie (13 January 2020). "Oscars: Nominations List". The Hollywood Reporter. Archived from the original on 13 January 2020. Retrieved 13 January 2020.
