“What did I find hard? Erm, all of it,” Ellie Bamber says laughing, but only just. Playing Kate Moss on the big screen was never going to be as simple as shrugging on the supermodel’s 1990s John Galliano Union Jack blazer and stumbling through the streets of London in front of a camera.
Not that either endeavour is unimportant. Bamber, 29, undertakes both convincingly in biopic Moss & Freud, out tomorrow. The film follows the model’s life between 2001 and 2002, when she sat nude for artist Lucian Freud three nights a week, from 7pm until late, over nine months, including while pregnant with her daughter Lila. The sittings resulted in Naked Portrait 2002, an almost life-size, full-length oil painting which sold at Christie’s for £3.9 million in 2005.
Becoming Moss meant more than mastering a walk, a voice or a wardrobe. She is one of the most famous women on the planet and one of London’s greatest cultural icons. From her hometown Croydon to Claridge’s, big Topshop, Primrose Hill, Glastonbury and the bedroom walls of adoring fans the city (and world) over, almost everyone has a take on what the real Kate is like.
Some of those opinions may owe more to the tabloids than her catwalk appearances; she has appeared in their pages throughout her career, which began when she was scouted at 14 in 1988. “I’ve played people who have been in the public eye before, but not in this kind of way,” says Bamber. “She’s one of the most photographed women and that is definitely scary and daunting.”
To embody her was a far more involved, uphill climb than the actor may first have thought when the email about the role arrived one morning in 2023, as she sat in her dressing gown at home in north London. “I just remember it being a total shock. I thought, ‘Who wouldn’t want to play Kate Moss?’ And then I think the fear set in very quickly. After that, I was like: ‘I’ve gotta do this now.’”
“I thought, ‘Who wouldn’t want to play Kate Moss?’ And then the fear set in”
I meet Bamber one hot May morning and we sit down on stools outside an Islington coffee shop. Her baggy light-blue jeans pool over her dark brown suede Clarks Wallabees. A reddish suede jacket matches her fiery hair and big Miu Miu sunglasses cover half her face. Her skin gleams in the early heatwave (“I am skincare obsessed,” she says). Her bowling-shaped handbag holds a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and she sips an almond milk iced matcha latte, with added sugar. She is, in other words, the picture of a 2026 north London cool girl.
You’ll just as easily find her frequenting Highbury’s pub gardens and London’s day festivals, or in the smoking areas of Koko Camden and the pop-up club Lost, as you will at a Miu Miu event in Cannes, Paris Fashion Week front rows and industry bashes at Annabel’s. As such, it should come as no surprise that Bamber had bumped into Moss herself on the scene over the years. But it was after she had been cast in the role by director James Lucas that one fateful meeting brought the pair far closer together. On the same mattress, in fact.
Attending a party hosted by designer Jasper Conran and his partner Oisin Byrne (coincidentally, the artist Bamber would most like to depict her, were she afforded Moss’s portrait treatment) she remembers cheekily letting slip her news. “I said to Jasper, ‘You can’t tell anyone but I’m going to be playing Kate Moss.’ He said: ‘Darling, she’s about to walk through the door in 15 minutes.’”
The pair hit it off, complete with posed-up Instagram posts. “It was just one of those chance encounters, some weird version of fate that’s really beautiful and special,” Bamber says. “It was a really nice space to actually first chat and get to know each other.”
Like so many who have met Moss over the years, Bamber was spellbound by her presence. “The aura is crazy,” she says. “You know how Gen Z people talk about aura — she has the craziest aura, I would say. She also has an ability to reel you in with stories. She’s an incredible orator, storyteller. I think everyone just becomes quite enraptured.”
Moss, an executive producer, was on set for the first day of filming. “I remember people kept being dragged to my dressing room by these incredible stories that she was telling,” remembers Bamber. “They said: ‘Come on now, we’ve got to do some work, it’s time we go.’ I think she’s just such an enigmatic character and she’s so unapologetically herself, as cringe as that is, but it’s so true.”
The first Mossism Bamber perfected was not the catwalk prowl, the cigarette hand or the defined cheekbones (though they would all come). “James Brown said at the beginning, ‘It’s the laugh,’” Bamber says, referring to Moss’s best friend and stylist since they were teenagers in Croydon. He became Bamber’s secret weapon when it came to preparation. “I remember taking that quite seriously.”
Brown’s other role was sourcing the clothes. The supermodel houses her archive looks in a barn at her home in Gloucestershire and the film had access to a handful of the real things. Alongside the Union Jack blazer was the black Topshop “cage” minidress from her collaboration with the retailer in 2007, as well as the standout original navy sequined gown Moss wore to her Beautiful and the Damned-themed 30th at Claridge’s, originally owned by Bond girl Britt Ekland. Brown sourced other vintage pieces, too, as well as modern looks he thought Moss would be fond of today: eagle-eyed fashionistas will spy a Nensi Dojaka dress here, a Galliano for Margiela piece there, and a new Versace chainmail look for good measure.
The supermodel houses her archive looks...and the film had access to a handful of the real things
A small team was assembled to complete her transformation. She spent hours with vocal coach Louise Jones to perfect Moss’s Croydon twang. In the film, she nails the accent so perfectly it sometimes sounds pulled from the YouTube clips they used as source material. Movement coach extraordinaire Polly Bennett, who helped Austin Butler become Elvis Presley and Timothée Chalamet channel Bob Dylan, had Bamber strutting up and down an old church hall, holding cigarettes (an action she practised so much that she started smoking again) and “understanding where movements and mannerisms come from”.
And, for the subject who famously uttered the line “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”, Bamber underwent a strict workout regime courtesy of personal trainer Luke Worthington. “I wanted to, obviously, look good — also because of the nudity and everything,” says Bamber, who, due to the film’s central focus, spent a substantial period of time in an infamously uncomfortable-looking position, draped on a metal bed, with her body exposed. “I trained quite a lot and I did a bit of dieting as well. Everything in a really healthy way,” she is eager to make clear.
To top things off, she began the weights-centric programme with a broken ankle. How did she manage that? “I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone this — I don’t know if I can. I broke an ankle in Rome. Let’s just say there was a horse involved.”
If the preparation sounds extreme, the film gives Bamber little room to hide. Moss & Freud is a fashion film but only in flashes: the Corinne Day feathered-headdress shoot on the beach for The Face, Moss eating a Magnum topless on a Vivienne Westwood catwalk, and other moments of fashion folklore. Bella Freud, the fashion designer (and one of Freud’s 14 officially acknowledged children) played exceptionally by Jasmine Blackborow, is a constant presence, having introduced the model to her father, Lucian. Other memories are more uncomfortable, including a flashback to Moss vulnerable at 17, posing with Mark Wahlberg for Calvin Klein. Mostly, though, it is about the sometimes charming, sometimes challenging relationship the then 28-year-old model developed with the 80-year-old painter, famous for his refusal to flatter his subjects.
“I obviously knew his work, not in great detail,” Bamber says. “I really plunged into that space.” Freud, the grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund, was born in Berlin in 1922 and fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1933 before settling in Britain. He died in 2011. What struck her was the way Freud painted the body without smoothing out its awkwardness or pain. “I remember reading this quote about his work, saying we all share the same sad shape,” she says. “He was never afraid to reveal the flaws of our anatomy as humans.”
Freud painted only from life, with other notable sitters including Queen Elizabeth II and performance artist Leigh Bowery. In 2008 his captivating portrait of Sue Tilley, a London benefits supervisor, sold at Christie’s in New York for $33.6 million — then a record for a living artist. In the film, Freud, portrayed by Sir Derek Jacobi with a mix of severity and mischief, says: “My desire is to get to the core of the being.”
Bamber first met Jacobi, 87, for lunch and found herself slightly dazed. “I remember thinking, pinch me, I am having lunch with Derek Jacobi, this is mental,” she says. “From there we ended up spending a lot of time together, and I think we developed kind of quite a cheeky rapport.”
“I remember thinking, pinch me, I am having lunch with Derek Jacobi”
In the film’s most powerful scene, Moss arrives at Freud’s studio only a few minutes late and finds him sitting in darkness. Freud berates her relentlessly, before she finally bites back. It feels cruel. “I think it was probably terrifying, because he’s quite a revered old man,” Bamber says. “But she’s an incredibly powerful businesswoman who I have no doubt very much stands up for herself and doesn’t suffer fools.”
As for what Moss remembers of the painter now, Bamber says: “She has this incredible fondness for him and the time they spent together. I think it was a really big moment within her life. I’ve always seen the story as a coming-of-age story, as well as a story of motherhood and of art. I also see it as a moment where her life changed and she went down a different path because of what she learned.”
It is well documented that neither artist nor muse was entirely pleased with the final portrait. “They both didn’t love it,” Bamber says. “I think that’s what the film speaks to: how the creative process itself is almost bigger than the result. When I make films, I think the journey and the process is always the beautiful and exciting part, and the end result is kind of the end result.”
Bamber was born in 1997 and grew up in Surrey, attending the independent Hawley Place school followed by Wellington College sixth form. Like Moss, she showed great potential from a very young age. She grew up learning from old Hollywood films at her grandparents’ house, before a drama teacher persuaded her to consider acting properly at 12. “He took his productions very seriously,” she says. “I just remember his vigour and his discipline were always so exciting to me.” During one such performance, she was spotted by the London Players’ Theatre, whose musical director later put her in touch with a casting director.
With her mother, who has worked as her manager since she was young, Bamber emailed her. “She said, look, there’s not really much I can do, but I can give you an audition for Aspects of Love that [theatre director] Trevor Nunn was doing.” After rounds of auditions (“I didn’t really know what was going on, to be honest,” Bamber says) she got the part, and made her professional acting debut at 13 at the Menier Chocolate Factory.
She moved to London at 17, for a part in Maria Friedman’s 2015 production of Cole Porter’s High Society at the Old Vic which earned her a nomination for the Evening Standard Theatre Award for emerging talent. “I ended up going on SpareRoom and I had a room in this lady’s flat, and I was living a Hannah Montana life,” she says. “I was going out and having the best time, but then coming home and trying to be really sensible around her. I was probably a bit of a terror.”
That same year she filmed Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals. The experience was “just divine” she says. “I learned so much from that. He’s so detailed and precise, even down to a nail varnish.” Films, TV and theatre followed, including the BBC’s Les Misérables, The Trial of Christine Keeler and The Serpent. Most recently she starred in the stage adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty at the Almeida, which ran for six weeks up to November 2025. “I hadn’t done theatre for six years and I don’t know why I left it that long — it was not a good idea.”
She has a Rolodex of projects coming out soon, too. In December she stars in the film Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol; then comes the sequel to Red, White & Royal Blue, alongside Nicholas Galitzine, whom she has known since they were teenagers (“we just take the piss out of each other the whole time”). After that is Animal Friends, an animated comedy alongside Aubrey Plaza (“Oh my gosh, she’s amazing”), Ryan Reynolds and Jason Momoa. She promises she will “absolutely, absolutely” be back in the West End soon and “would love” a stint on Broadway.
After her months of studying the myth of Moss, Bamber is happily back to being herself. She has quit smoking again, is heading to visit her parents in the country the weekend after we meet and is hotly anticipating a European summer (Cadaqués in Spain is her lesser-known destination for escaping the city). Ultimately, she has toned down the glamour. “I honestly spend most days exclusively in a tracksuit,” she says.
Still, in a drawer at home, she has the KM-initialled Agent Provocateur underwear sets from the film, one of the relics from her biggest role to date. “I’ve put them away somewhere safe, because I think it’s an incredible memory to have.”
Moss and Freud is out on May 29
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