Krysty Norma Lesley Wilson-Cairns (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.
Early life and education
Wilson-Cairns was born on 26 May 1987 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. At the age of 15, she had a work experience placement on the Scottish detective show Taggart. 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. She became a runner on the show as well as on other television series including Rebus and Lip Service.
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. She also contributed to its comic book series. 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.