Aussie actress Emily Browning has really carved out an unusual niche for herself: Whenever another actress has to drop out of a project involving a dreamlike brothel and a main character who goes to her happy place during sex acts, Browning is there to step in. That’s what she did when Amanda Seyfried’s scheduling conflicts kept her out of the role of Babydoll in Zack Snyder’s critically maligned Sucker Punch, and that’s what she’ll do in Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty, which will play in competition in this year’s Cannes Film Festival (and was originally supposed to star Mia Wasikowska). Though Browning wears less makeup and fewer corsets in this movie — and crucially, she’s not shooting at any killer Nazi robots during her happy-place interludes — the overall vibe is the same: Browning is an ambiguously motivated prostitute whose shtick is drugging herself to sleep while “performing.” (Leave it to sex workers to find uncomfortable new ways to fall asleep on the job.)
