Kaya Scodelario remembers her first encounter with fame and success. Despite the fact that she’s only 31, it came nearly 20 years ago as Skins fast became a noughties youth culture phenomenon alongside Arctic Monkeys and The Inbetweeners. Coincidentally, the story takes place at the 2010 NME Awards after we’d put her on the cover with her very first magazine shoot: “I got hammered and Lily Allen was there and she took the rum off my table. That’s my one memory of the night… Oh and it was sponsored by [Shockwaves].”
Seventeen years after her acting debut in Skins as the troubled Effy, Scodelario, like many of the show’s alumni such as Nicholas Hoult, Daniel Kaluuya and Dev Patel, has long established herself as an actor of remarkable depth and Hollywood star quality. She has spent much of her time since her Skins stint wrapped in 2010 Stateside, appearing in huge franchises such as Pirates Of The Caribbean, The Maze Runner and, most recently, brain-splattered zombie horror Resident Evil. She also delivered an ethereal performance in Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights and won cult acclaim for her gritty and physical work in alligator-infested creature-feature Crawl.
“My one memory of the NME Awards? I got hammered and Lily Allen took the rum off my table”
Now, she is back on home soil for Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, a long-form, eight-episode Netflix adaptation of his 2019 crime caper film of the same name which starred Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam and Hugh Grant as ne’er do wells mixed up with weed, blackmail and Russian oligarchs which was set against a backdrop of country estates and swanky member’s clubs.
The show is essentially an expansion of the movie, following Eddie (Theo James) after he discovers that his late aristocratic father’s estate is part of a vast marijuana empire and the toff subsequently becomes involved in the British underworld. Eddie is led into The Gentlemen’s gilt-edged criminal landscape of Wagyu steak, underground boxing bouts and evangelical drug barons by the immaculately named Susie Glass, played with bravura wit by Scodelario.
Susie is the finely tailored crime boss who’s weed is growing underneath Eddie’s estate. She commands the respect of hard knocks and fear from the toffs. Scodelario, who is eminently charming (she’ll repeatedly call you “love” like a neighbour you’ve known since childhood) with her penchant for Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and down-to-earth energy (she laughs about how she finds actors “boring” and counts few among her friends), fits into the role of Glass as if it was sculpted for her.
Being the rare Ritchie project to not feature some of his usual ensemble – though Vinnie Jones reunites with the director for the first time since 2000’s Snatch – Scodelario had a lengthy casting process to win the role of Susie: “I auditioned a few times – I think Guy felt it was really important to find someone who felt authentic to that world. I really wanted to play her. I did a self-tape and I’m not very good at auditioning so I did it in a t-shirt with my hair up at home. They said: ‘[Guy] loves it but he needs to see you looking more Susie.’ He wanted me to look more glamorous and I just happened to be in Italy for a friend’s wedding – I have a bougie friend – and I was all dressed up so after the ceremony, I did another self-tape on a clifftop in Italy and tried to give it as much Susie Glass as I could.”
Scodelario came to the show as a lifelong admirer of Ritchie’s work (her favourite is Snatch because of Brad Pitt’s abs) and part of her excitement about joining the project was to put a female stamp on the director’s largely male dominated films. “I thought it was important that we bring a strong female character to the Guy Ritchie universe. He’s dabbled in it before but to have a woman front and centre and to stand toe to toe with other gangsters was important. And a challenge that I definitely wanted to be a part of. I just tried to be as ballsy as I could and I think he liked that energy.”
Ritchie, known for his improvisation and collaborative creativity, gave Scodelario a lot of space to mould the definitive Susie Glass: “When you read her on the page, it would have been easy to picture her as the stereotypical mobster,” she admits, but things changed after she was cast: “I came to find out he was building the character around me and I gave him a different perspective on what she should be.” It turned out that Glass was indeed being sculpted for her.
Scodelario was adamant about not being relegated to a gangster’s moll like many female characters across the crime genre: “It was something I was concerned about before I signed on. I wanted to make sure she wasn’t going to slip into the background or just become the girlfriend.”
Scodelario comes to a show about the landed gentry from a unique perspective, having grown up working class in Islington with a stridently Brazilian background (her mother moved to the UK in the 1990s). The Gentlemen was filmed on real country manors as well as Ritchie’s own Ashcombe House in the rolling hills of Wiltshire from where he operates a brewery and his WildKitchen business. Both products having sneaky cameos in the show.
Scodelario says: “I’m fascinated by the class system in this country. I’ve always found it odd how we have these embedded societal rules. I think the job of The Gentlemen is to show you never know who the real gangsters are. There’s this great monologue by Giancarlo Esposito where he explains that the gentlemen are the original gangsters, that everything was passed down in bloodlines.”
Having spent so much of her post-Skins career in America, save for stealing the show in Agatha Christie adaptation The Pale Horse, Scodelario was enticed at the idea of returning to work in the UK: “I really wanted to come back to England and do something British – walking out of my caravan in the morning and there’s Vinnie Jones and Ray Winstone having a cup of tea. I thought, ‘it doesn’t get more British than this’ That’s the epitome of what I wanted to do.”
“I really wanted to come back to England and do something British”
Though eager and happy to be back embedded in the UK, Scodelario was more than thankful for everything America did for her career, especially post-Skins when the tabloid glare was brutal and casting directors only saw her as one thing: “Being a teenager on a very popular UK show wasn’t always a good thing. Especially as a woman. We didn’t have the same protections and weren’t looked after in the same way a lot of people in the public eye are. But in America, nobody cared. You spend a week in New York and nobody gives a shit.”
Scodelario isn’t the first British actor to find America the land of opportunity. Her close friend Daniel Kaluuya had similar trouble landing substantial roles and it’s a path many have followed since Idris Elba blazed a trail as iconic Baltimorean heroin dealer Stringer Bell in The Wire. She reasons why: “The Americans don’t see class the same way. I felt like over here I was boxed into being a working class actor. Or a Skins actor. Edgy, untrained, rough and raw. The US just saw me as an actor and I loved that,” she says, acknowledging that it boosted her confidence in exploring the roles she could play: “Now I’m a little bit older and braver, I know I can go into a room with a British casting director and say I can do anything, I don’t just need to be the maid.”
Any conversation with Scodelario naturally arrives at the legacy of Skins which was like a line of cocaine to the civility of British TV drama in 2007. She somehow isn’t fed up of talking about it and is more than willing to interrogate its history, both on and off screen, particularly as the success of HBO hit Euphoria has led to comparisons between the two.
She acknowledges that the “safeguarding wasn’t there” on Skins and it’s notable that her first thought about Euphoria is that she “hopes the actors get taken care of”. She adds that watching the tearaway teens played by the likes of Zendaya and Sydney Sweeney caused her to reflect on her own experiences as a young actor in a show with lots of drink, drugs and sex: “I was thinking, ‘God these actors are so brave’ and that this must be quite scary for them. I then had this realisation that I did all that at 14 without anybody taking care of us.”
Overall, her relationship with the show appears to be very positive. Skins gave her – a working class teenager to an immigrant single parent – a career as well as lifelong friends who still reunite every Christmas: “Skins Christmas is more special to me than actual Christmas because we’re chosen family. We joke we’re either bonded by trauma or bonded by success.”
It’s a sign of her closeness with some of her Skins comrades that she needs no excuse to wax lyrical about the talents of Nicholas Hoult and reveals that he was posting pictures in the group chat from his time on set with Nicolas Cage in Renfield. She also upholds him as a standard bearer for good behaviour in an industry where being a scumbag can be overly tolerated.
“I was talking to Nick Hoult the other day and we realised we’d been on sets for 20 years. If we were doctors or lawyers, we would get a pen or some shit. Whenever I work with somebody who’s a dick, I look at Nick and think when you are able to be this successful for so long and be the kind of human being you are, there is never an excuse for arrogant behaviour. I think we are getting better at saying ‘no we’re not going to work with people like this’. A set should be like every other workplace where people are treated with respect.”
After conquering the UK, conquering America, and coming back to conquer the UK a second time, Scodelario’s next target is her ancestral home of Brazil. She’s set to appear in an upcoming Netflix series about Formula 1 racing driver Ayrton Senna – remarkably the first Brazilian role for the half-Brazilian actress who was raised speaking Portuguese at home. The mum of two also wants to do a family-friendly project, given her seven and two-year-old have slim pickings across her filmography: “I’d love to do a voiceover in a kid’s movie. When I watch my son watching those films, that is the magic of cinema to me.”
‘The Gentlemen’ streams on Netflix from March 7
Image credits:
Photographer: Kieron Webb
Stylist: Jenny Kennedy
Hair: Bjorn Krischker
Makeup: Kenneth Soh