From teen star to Hollywood pro, actor Kaya Scodelario knows how to handle herself, says Zing Tsjeng
Kaya Scodelario has been getting recognised by a lot of Gen Zers lately – mainly in supermarkets. ‘I want to go to them, “I’m an old lady!”’ she protests. (She’s only 34, FYI.) ‘“I’m just in Sainsbury’s doing my shopping – why do you care?” But Skins does seem to transcend generations.’ The show is enjoying a renaissance via Instagram and TikTok with a new audience, but if you grew up anywhere near a TV screen in the late ’00s, the gritty E4 teen drama was inescapable – and by extension so was Scodelario, who played Effy, the coolly mysterious Bristol tearaway who inspired teenage girls all over Britain to smudge their eyeliner and rip holes in their tights.
Today, the Brazilian-British actor cuts a significantly more grown-up figure when we meet at the Andaz London hotel, wearing a chic Longchamp dress from her Grazia cover shoot and politely tucking into her lunch of grilled salmon. Unlike Effy, she was never the chaotic party girl. ‘I would love to be a mess, but life has turned out in the way that I’ve had to grow up quite quickly.’ That’s putting it lightly. After starring in five seasons of Skins, the teenage Scodelario ventured across the pond to star in blockbuster franchises like Pirates Of The Caribbean, The Maze Runner and Resident Evil. She’s had an impressively nimble career ever since, pulling off festive romcoms (This Is Christmas), gut-churning horror (Crawl) and Agatha Christie-esque thrillers (The Woman In Cabin 10). ‘I was determined to push myself to do different things and to not be typecast [after Skins],’ she explains. ‘I felt like I could play anyone in America.’ She once broke a finger on day one of a film set and pushed through the pain – not for nothing was her childhood heroine Sarah Connor from Terminator.
This year, Scodelario returns for season two of the Netflix crime caper The Gentlemen as the impeccably styled and whipsmart Susie, a mobster’s daughter who has commandeered an English country estate for a weed empire. Directed by Guy Ritchie, the rollicking reimagining of his film of the same name is given a feminist twist thanks to Scodelario’s character. ‘She’s got the biggest balls in the room at all times.’
Ritchie has a notoriously off-the-cuff approach to directing – Scodelario’s co-star Theo James has called it getting ‘Ritchied’ – in which the director rewrites scripts on the go and feeds the new lines to actors on the spot. ‘On the day, he reads the dialogue and goes, “No, I don’t like any of that. Let’s change it all,”’ Scodelario says. ‘This time around, me and Theo knew what was going to happen – and it does unlock this really unique way of being completely present as a character, which I love.’ It can be terrifying for anybody not used to it. It’s why, ahead of filming, Scodelario made a point of sliding into the DMs of Love Island presenter Maya Jama, who makes her acting debut as the glamorous Aisha. ‘I just said, “Hey, babe, heads up! This is going to not be what you expect. Be ready to be on your toes and trust the process,”’ she says. ‘I knew how intimidating it is stepping into a new part of your career and coming from a working class background. I just wanted her to know that I’m a girls’ girl.’
PHOTOGRAPHS JACK GRANGE
STYLING MOLLY HAYLOR
Published on 1st September 2026
Hair: PATRICK WILSON AT THE WALL GROUP USING GHD
Make-up: BUSTER KNIGHT AT A-FRAME USING COSMETIC CONSULT
Nails: AMY HIDE USING ESSIE AND L’OCCITANE
Shoot Producer: Anna Dewhurst
Photographer’s Assistants: KAROLINA BURLIKOWSKA
DIGITAL ASSISTANT: LIAM PRIOR
Fashion Assistants: LIV BELLAMY, AMBER BACKHOUSE
Editor-in-chief: HATTIE BRETT
creative director: carolyn roberts
Deputy editor: hanna woodsidE
Unlike the couture-clad Susie – the kind of woman who wears a Chanel towel and disco ball earrings in the sauna – Scodelario is more of a ‘jeans and T-shirt’ girl. She based the ultra-glam character on her Brazilian mother’s friends and the parents of her mates growing up on a council estate in north London: confident, fast-talking women who were never spotted without red lippie and big earrings.
Scodelario was raised by her mother, immersed in Brazilian culture – she still speaks fluent Portuguese and makes a mean feijoada. ‘It was 100% an immigrant childhood,’ Scodelario says. ‘I’ve always wanted to earn everything that I have. I think maybe that does come from coming from nothing.’ After getting cast in Skins at 14, Scodelario decided to pursue acting full-time just two years later. ‘I was ready to be on my own two feet and start life.’ This didn’t come without challenges. ‘I left home at 16 with £36.50 in my bank account.’ She sofa-surfed for a year at various friends’ houses. ‘I would have loved to [go to drama school] – it was just something that I knew would never be on the cards for me financially.’
I LEFT HOME AT 16 WITH £36.50 IN MY BANK ACCOUNT
Kaya Scodelario
Left: Jacket, £455, Longchamp
Right: Blazer, £790, shirt, £325, polo shirt, £295, and trousers, £510, all Longchamp
Read more in the latest issue of Grazia magazine
She’s still weighing up how she feels about it all. ‘I’ve always said sex scenes are like stunts,’ she says finally. ‘They should be treated with the same care and respect.’ Has anyone from the production company ever reached out to her? ‘Not yet. But I think it’s a conversation that we will have one day.’
Two decades on, Scodelario now goes out of her way to advocate for other actors – to be, as she said, a girls’ girl. ‘If there’s a younger actress [on set], I’ll go up to her in the make-up chair and say, “If anything makes you uncomfortable or you have any questions and you’re too nervous about going to a producer or a director, come to me and I’ll help you out.”’
These days, Scodelario is clearly much more den mother than sullen Skins teenager – even though, as I keep reminding her, 34 is nowhere near as old as she thinks. ‘I run the class WhatsApp group for my kids at school, and that brings me so much joy,’ she protests mischievously. ‘Honestly, I get more “I did a good job today” [satisfaction] because I reminded everyone about the bake sale than I do walking a red carpet.’
‘The Gentlemen’ season two starts 3 September on Netflix
Class, she says, is still very much an issue in the film and TV industry. ‘I absolutely still feel like I am a minority as a working-class actor,’ Scodelario says thoughtfully. ‘I’ll be at a work dinner party and maybe one or two people will sound like me, but certainly not everyone else.’ It’s why, you suspect, she has such affection for Skins, which introduced an entire generation of young working-class talent to our screens – and, more importantly, introduced them to each other. She is still best friends with many of its actors: ‘Nick [Hoult, who played Effy’s brother] is someone that I will always feel understands my path and my career more than anyone else,’ she says. ‘Ollie Barbieri [JJ], I go to for romantic advice.’ Daniel Kaluuya, who grew up in the same neighbourhood as Scodelario and played Posh Kenneth, is her son’s godfather. There’s even a Skins group chat, which has a distinctly ‘not safe for work’ name she decides to keep under wraps.
‘We had this crazy experience. Going through that together means that we have a protectiveness with each other.’ That fondness is tempered by the complications of looking back on a show filmed in an age before the widespread use of intimacy coordinators and other safeguarding measures. On TikTok, Scodelario once posted about watching the equally gritty HBO teen drama Euphoria and thinking it was ‘crazy for 17-year-olds, then [I remembered] what I was doing on TV at 14’. A director on an episode would ‘maybe have a discussion with the actors’, she acknowledges, ‘but then again they’d usually be much older men talking to teenagers about being intimate together’.
ALL GROWN uP
Dress, £545, and sandals, £510, both Longchamp
Top, £295, and trousers, £1,760, both Longchamp
She is keen to imbue her ferocious work ethic in her young son and daughter, whom she shares with her ex-husband, the actor Ben Walker. The pair met on the set of the fantasy film The King’s Daughter. ‘I hope that’s something I’ll pass on, that they’ll always be resourceful and not expect anything for free in life.’
Her background is in sharp contrast to the many British actors who tread the well-worn path from private school to elite institutions like RADA. ‘When Downton Abbey was huge, I’d get sent auditions for it,’ she explains. ‘Before even looking, I knew that I was auditioning for one of the downstairs people. I never once got an audition for one of the ladies.’
Dress, £510, boots, £585, and bag, £480, all Longchamp
SEX SCENES ARE LIKE STUNTS. THEY SHOULD
BE TREATED WITH
THE SAME CARE
Kaya Scodelario