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).
