Isla Johnston by Norman Jean Roy for Vogue US November 2025

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Isla Johnston by Norman Jean Roy for Vogue US November 2025

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On an overcast afternoon in mid-September, Isla Johnston, the 18-year-old star of Baz Luhrmann’s much-anticipated film based on the life of Joan of Arc, is wandering through The Met Cloisters. The museum—a 1930s amalgam of medieval monasteries and priories, transported from Europe to the far northern tip of Manhattan—is a fitting setting for her Vogue shoot. Luhrmann’s films are steeped in history and famous for thrilling atemporal digressions—Shakespeare’s Verona as a modern-day urban beachscape, raucous crowds in the Moulin Rouge stomping their feet to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Nevertheless, as Johnston enters a 12th-century structure, lifted from a Cistercian abbey south of Bordeaux, the veil of history descends: It’s a space that seems to reverberate with the murmurs of Benedictine monks, the light filtering through the arched-stone window as it might have a millennia ago.

Luhrmann’s Jehanne d’Arc movie (still untitled—and which he intends to begin shooting next year) will tell one of the unlikeliest of hallowed stories: that of a 17-year-old girl from the French village of Domrémy, possessed by divine voices and visions that instructed her to save France—at that time ensnarled in the conflict with England known as the Hundred Years’ War. Since 1420, France had been under the claim of the English Crown; the enfeebled 26-year-old French heir—the future Charles VII—was in retreat, broken, and insecure. Orléans, a strategic city, had been besieged; it was a teenage Joan who broke the blockade in 1429, creating a turning point in the conflict and allowing the French monarchy to eventually regain control.

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Isla Johnston by Norman Jean Roy for Vogue US November 2025

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