At Cannes this spring, How to Have Sex was the film on everyone’s lips. The sweaty, sad, sun-drenched British indie flick, about three 16-year-old girls on a rites-of-passage party holiday in Malia, Greece, won the French film festival’s Un Certain Regard prize. John C Reilly, jury president of the arthouse award, said the drama “brings us closer to understanding the human condition”. Vanity Fair called it “stunning”. And at the centre of it all was its breakout star, Mia McKenna-Bruce, by this point six months pregnant and sporting on the red carpet a baby bump covered in sequins. “It was pretty mental,” she says. “I felt like a real-life disco ball. Despite carrying around a watermelon, I felt as good as I could.”
Good, and just a little overwhelmed. The two most significant events in McKenna-Bruce’s career and personal life were colliding. After eight years on the child cast of the CBBC show Tracy Beaker Returns and its spinoff The Dumping Ground, and promising turns on Netflix’s wry Jane Austen adaptation Persuasion and cancer drama Kindling, How To Have Sex was her first proper star moment. And she was about to become a first-time mother. “I don’t do things by halves,” the 26-year-old tells me with a husky laugh, as she thinks back on her life a few months ago. “It was really surreal. Even still, I think, ‘What on earth?’”
