There was a moment in the 2010s when I swear I saw Kaya Scodelario’s eyes more than I saw my mum’s. The same way that Jennifer Lopez’s Grammys gown prompted the creation of Google Images in 2000, at one point it seemed that Scodelario’s blinking blue eyes, as captured on E4’s gritty teen drama Skins, rimmed in black eyeliner and glitter, were the sole reason Instagram existed. And makeup tutorials. “My friends would all ask me to do the Effy makeup on them and I couldn’t so we’d all gather around and watch this one girl on YouTube. There was only one, that’s how new it was,” recalls Scodelario, now 33, eyes still a bright, glacier blue.
The actor is, in many ways, the consummate cool girl, not least because of the four years she spent playing the beautiful and sullen Effy Stonem, patron saint of fishnet tights. Since then, she has traded in the party girl persona (mostly; “I am still the girl that loves going to the pub more than anything else”) for a low-key existence in north London – popping her head above the parapet every now and then to star in Hollywood hits (Pirates of the Caribbean), major franchises (Maze Runner), Netflix smashes (The Gentleman), creature features (Crawl), and F1 capers (Senna).
Her latest, Adulthood, is a new category for Scodelario: a shoestring-budget indie that hits all the beats of a comic crime noir. To the role of Meg, Scodelario brings both world-weariness and coiled tension. Her soccer mum exterior rubbing away to reveal something more adventure-seeking, a woman ready to hit the eject button out of her small-town life at any minute. Josh Gad plays her wannabe screenwriter brother.
Marriage, children, a mortgage – there are a number of things that’ll bring on the cold water splash of adulthood, but finding a rotting corpse in the walls of your parents’ basement ought to do it. It’s this situation that the hapless siblings find themselves in, one bad decision spiralling into dozens. Scodelario would be dialling 911 immediately. “Personally, I would be useless,” she says, laughing sheepishly. “I call the police for anything. I really respect the law and I’m scared of doing bad things.” Effy would be appalled!
As for Scodelario’s own reckoning with adulthood, she says, “I felt more like an adult when I was 14 than I do now.” Granted her life at 14 looked very different to that of the other schoolgirls in East Finchley. “I was put into quite a weird industry and surrounded by grown-ups all the time so had to learn very quickly how to present like a grown-up in order to be taken seriously,” she says. “But since I’ve hit 30 I’m really enjoying not being the grown-up everyone wants me to be. I still have responsibilities and I like a lot of adulthood – saying no to things, and having my own voice – but I also want to do karaoke in a dodgy bar at three in the morning with some mates I’ve just met.” Scodelario isn’t a “fully cooked adult” just yet: “Maybe because I don’t drive yet. I’m still holding on to that.”
People wanted me to be the English rose because it's easier than saying my surname correctly
It is odd seeing Scodelario, whose party girl antics I and millions of others had watched and aspired to for years, in a subdued real-life setting – the outline of her homelife fuzzed out by a Zoom filter. Effy was Brat before Brat, the prototype club rat, the original indie sleaze icon. She was also nothing like the actor playing her, not on the surface at least.
“I was painfully shy and insecure. I was very unworldly and Effy was an opportunity for me to fake that confidence and have empathy for other people’s experiences,” says Scodelario. “But at the core of Effy was always pain and I think that core of her was always the real me. But the outside of her, how she presented herself – the clothes, the makeup, the confidence – that was the opposite of who I was.”
Was there ever any pressure to live up to the Effy image, I wonder. Jack O’Connell, who played bad boy Cook with whom Scodelario had been in a relationship, has said as much. “I think probably male and females experience that quite differently,” ventures Scodelario. “For me, it was a lot of people being like, ‘Oh you’re not as hot as Effy.’ Because she was confident and had the makeup and clothes and I was this skinny little shy, raggedy-haired kid in a tracksuit. So I always found that a bit tricky.” But, she adds, “I tried not to allow myself to feel an expectation to be like her.”
After Skins, Scodelario decamped to the US. A London girl through and through, she was unable to cut the ties fully, however – instead flying back and forth from Los Angeles and home on repeat. “I was very fortunate that in the States my accent didn’t sound common,” she says. (Scodelario grew up with her mum in a council flat in Islington. A true Nineties baby, she had a bunk bed, Groovy Chick bed sheets, and an inflatable armchair.) The nuances of Britain’s class system were lost on American casting agents: “I just sounded like a British person. And they embraced my being Brazilian in a way that the UK never did – people wanted me to be the English rose because that’s easier than having to say all the vowels in my surname correctly.”
Scodelario had her first child shortly after the move. She became a mother the same year she played a tough-as-nails teenager in the YA hit Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. “You look back on it, don’t you?” she says now. “And I go ‘bloody hell, I was 23’. I didn’t realise it at the time; I didn’t feel 23. I was in love and it felt like the right thing to do.” As for work, it didn’t slow her down. “I never wanted it to be an excuse for a producer not to employ me, so I continued to work and I did my job well. I never used it as a reason for why I shouldn’t be taken as seriously as my male counterpart.”
Being a parent and an actor isn’t anything unusual, and yet doing press for The Gentleman earlier this year, it was only Scodelario who was ever asked about it. “Theo [James] has two kids too, and whenever I got asked and he didn’t, he’d step in and go, ‘Actually I struggle a lot more to parent and do this job!’”
Starting a family helped instil in Scodelario the belief that her job wasn’t the be-all and end-all. “I need life outside of Hollywood. More than anything I love sitting around this kitchen table with my girlfriends hearing them bitch about their dates.” Scodelario’s best friend of eight years travels the world with her and helps out with the kids. “It’s a little village,” she smiles, dimples flaring.
Scodelario recalls her time as a new mum on set fondly. “I’d be breastfeeding in the makeup chair, and pumping in a tent in between scenes on The Maze Runner with these poor 23-year-old guys being like, ‘Oh my God! What’s that machine doing to your tit?’” For what it’s worth, Scodelario has never really had a problem when it comes to speaking up for herself. Returning to the role of Effy in 2013 for a standalone Skins special, “I really advocated for myself,” she says. “Financially, knowing my worth as an actor and what I felt was fair, and also making sure that the scenes were safe. I cut two sex scenes from the scripts because they didn’t feel necessary.”
For all its enduring popularity, Skins remains a snapshot of a bygone time. The lack of social media and smartphones is glaring – both on screen and off. It’s something Scodelario and her former castmates have spoken about at length, she says. “Some of us feel, and I won’t say who, that they really missed out on the opportunity of making money from Skins because social media wasn’t a thing. And it’s true, we hardly made any money doing that show. We were all first-time actors, we didn’t have agents and the production company knew that… whatever, it happens. But a lot of them feel as though if we had social media, we would’ve been able to carve out a career outside of it, or at least show our value to other productions.”
Scodelario herself is relieved. “As a teenager, what people say can really corrode you. It can chip away at your sense of self and then it doesn’t become about the art or the acting. It becomes about this persona of yourself you’re trying to put out there.” These days, she is on Instagram for work. Most of the time, she has to stop herself from posting pictures of her dog’s vomit or the stains on her carpet.
In 2022, responding to Euphoria, HBO’s provocative teen series and spiritual successor to Skins, Scodelario wrote that safeguarding “wasn’t really a thing back then”. She doesn’t begrudge the producers for that, though. “It was back when we still used words like ‘happy pills’ – we don’t have the vocabulary for mental health like we do now so I don’t blame Skins for that because it just wasn’t a thing,” she says. “I mean it was bound to get intense. There was no way there wasn’t going to be a bunch of drama, which we certainly did, but we had each other, which is really special.” To this day, Scodelario calls Dev Patel, Nicholas Hoult, and Daniel Kaluuya her family.
If Scodelario were to set up her own show with a bunch of youngsters and first-time actors, “I would make sure safeguarding was in place so they felt they had a safe space to talk that is separate from production. There is no head of HR for actors, which is so crazy.” She tries to be the head of HR for any young actors she works with. “I’m really protective of young people, especially women, in this industry.”
It’s that nurturing instinct in her that makes Euphoria such a tough watch. “It is difficult to watch something like that and not think, ‘f***, were they OK?’ I’m sure they were and it’s a different time now but it’s really hard not to watch that and not have a small voice in the back of your mind go, ‘I hope someone was taking care of them!’”
She’s taking care of herself too. Earlier this year, Scodelario made her stage debut in East is South by House of Cards writer Beau Willimon. “I felt vulnerable and afraid every night,” she says. “Every evening, I’d stand there looking at the emergency exit to my right and the stage door to my left and fight the urge not to run out of the theatre.” The experience was great, but it was a lot. Scodelario would love to do another play sometime, but has the wisdom now to know not to rush it. “I definitely need a few years to relax from that.” There you have it, Effy is all grown up.
‘Adulthood’ is on UK and Ireland digital platforms from 17 November
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