How Isla Johnston Became Baz Luhrmann’s Joan of Arc

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 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 m