Krysty Wilson-Cairns

Krysty Norma Lesley Wilson-Cairns in Glasgow, Scotland. 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. 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.

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. She studied Digital Film and Television at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS), and graduated in 2009. Her first creative work at the RCS was a short story about killer guinea pigs. She credits her ambition to become a screenwriter on being inspired by one of her lecturers at the RCS, screenwriter Richard Smith. 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. 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.

Career Wilson-Cairns sold her first film script to FilmNation Entertainment in 2014. It was for the science fiction thriller project Aether, which provided her breakthrough after it made the top ten of the Black List. The script was read by screenwriter John Logan who hired her as a staff writer on his television show Penny Dreadful in 2015. 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. Filmmaker Sam Mendes was impressed by her treatment, and suggested collaborating on a future film project. They had previously met while working on Penny Dreadful, for which he was an executive producer, and worked on two potential projects together. This included a film adaptation of Gay Talese's book The Voyeur's Motel and an Invisibilia podcast. However, both projects fell through due to licensing issues. In 2017, she was named as one of Forbes 30 under 30 in the Hollywood and Entertainment category.

Her feature film debut was the screenplay for Mendes' World War I film 1917 (2019) which she co-wrote. 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. 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, In October 2020, she co-founded Great Company with producer Jack Ivins. The following year, the company signed a two-year film deal with Universal Pictures. She co-wrote the screenplay of Edgar Wright's psychological horror Last Night in Soho (2021), and had a cameo as a bartender. 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. 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. 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.

Filmography Film

Television Year Title Role Notes 2016Penny DreadfulWriter 2 episodes: "No Beast So Fierce", "Perpetual Night"Also staff writer in season 3

Awards and nominations