The Gentleman’s Kaya Scodelario’s rise from C4 drama to star of Netflix hit and why she has a strict ‘no a**eholes’ rule
SHE plays a menacing mobster in hit TV series The Gentlemen – and in real life Kaya Scodelario has had to be just as tough.
After making her breakthrough in controversial Channel 4 drama Skins, aged just 14, she was thrust into an industry rife with allegations that would later come out in the #MeToo movement.
Now established after a string of top films and TV dramas, Kaya, 32, refuses to compromise when it comes to basic decency — and that starts with her co-stars.
She said: “I vet everyone first. I just make sure that they’re not an a**ehole. I have a genuine ‘no a**ehole policy’.
“I will not give my time to people who think they can behave like that.
“I’ve met so many incredible actors and directors that don’t behave that way, so there’s no excuse for it.
“When I started out, it was like, ‘Oh, it’s Jack the lad’, or, ‘It’s because he’s intense’.
“But no, just be a nice person, be respectful and be kind. It’s very Nineties to be that way.
“I’ve been lucky to have good experiences in the industry, and I’m too long in the tooth, I can’t be an a**ehole.
“I don’t want to be around bad energy because I’m too aggressive — I’ll kick off, it’s not good.”
Nor is Kaya willing to settle for any clichéd roles.
‘Bullied so badly’
When she landed the part of mob daughter Susie Glass in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen on Netflix, she had to be sure she would not start off as an icy mobster then suddenly melt when staring into the eyes of dashing leading man Theo James.
She recalled on Waitrose’s Dish podcast: “I was sent the first two episodes and I had a phone call with the writer, and I said, ‘This is great so far, but I need assurance she will continue to be this great.
“I don’t want her to drop off, to suddenly become a love interest and nothing else’.
“I really felt like it would be beneficial to bring that into the show’s universe, and it’s done well.
“It’s exciting and it kind of breaks the rules that it has to be a male-dominated line-up.”
Sadly, Kaya has not always had as much say with the environment in which she works, starting with her time on Skins in 2006, when she played Effy Stonem, a drug-taking, binge-drinking sixth-former.
The writers — father and son duo Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain — cast her at an after-school audition in North London aimed at teenagers.
She said: “I’d moved to that school in Finsbury Park six months before because I was bullied so badly at my previous school that I’d had to leave, and I didn’t know anyone there.
“But the school got a fax saying they had open auditions from this show called Skins and they wanted teenagers.
“They didn’t want to do what the Americans had done for a long time, which was to have 25-year-olds playing teens — and I wanted to see what it looked like, so I went along after school.
“Bryan came outside for a cigarette, and he came over to me and said, ‘Do you want to come in and audition?’. And I was like, ‘OK’.”
It was a move that would see Kaya, raised mostly by her single Brazilian mum, go on to leave home at the age of 16 to pursue her acting career.
But, she explained, there was little to no safeguarding for the Skins cast, even through they filmed sex scenes and pretended to inject drugs.
Kaya added: “Back then there wasn’t the same safeguarding with young actors, and there wasn’t anyone checking if we were OK.”
She is not the only former cast member to have discussed the lack of protection for the youngsters.
April Pearson and Laya Lewis, who played Michelle and Liv, slammed the series as “traumatic” as they appeared together on the Are You Michelle From Skins? podcast in 2021.
The pair also alleged that the cast’s young girls were body-shamed behind the scenes and asked to line up in bikinis to check they “looked good enough to film in Morocco”.
Laya said: “I turned 18 right at the beginning of filming, so I just had so many more sex scenes than everyone else.
“There was one point where we were told to skip breakfast, and for dinner we should just have a jacket potato.
“I definitely felt a lot of pressure to be slimmer. At the time, I thought it was horrible, but I think it’s so much f***ing worse now.
“If you want to pluck children off the street, which is essentially what they were doing, there needs to be a bit of help.”
A show representative responded at the time: “We’re deeply and unambiguously sorry that any cast member was made to feel uncomfortable or inadequately respected in their work during their time on Skins.”
Since leaving the show in 2010, Kaya — who has two children with her estranged husband, actor Benjamin Walker, 41 — has celebrated success after success.
In 2012, she appeared in BBC One serial True Love as Karen, the love interest of her teacher, played by Billie Piper.
And from 2014, she became the female lead in The Maze Runner series of films.
She also starred in 2017’s Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales as pirate’s daughter Carina Smyth alongside Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley.
‘Impostor syndrome’
As Susie in The Gentlemen, she is the daughter of jailed drugs mobster Bobby Glass, played by Ray Winstone, and is the de facto boss of her family’s huge crime syndicate.
She crashes into the life of Theo James’s Eddie Halstead who, after the death of his father, becomes the new Duke of Halstead.
After discovering his drug-taking older brother is in £4million of debt to another crime boss, he and Susie find themselves running a drugs empire together.
But being at the top of her game, both in and out of character, does not mean Kaya has stopped leaning on those around her.
She added to Dish: “I have huge impostor syndrome, which I think is part of being British, right?
“I realise I’ve been doing it for 17 years, and I probably have more experience than a lot of people. I want to be challenged. I don’t ever want to feel like, ‘Oh, I’ve got this’.
“Ray was really good at helping me step into that. He really grew my confidence.
“He’s just the loveliest, cuddliest person, and allowed me to stretch myself as an actor.”
She added: “Growing up in North London, the gangsters that I was most scared of were the women.
“There weren’t high-up gangsters, but some families were dodgy, and the dads would go out and do the work, but the mums were the ones I was terrified of.
“I love that Susie Glass is already a woman when you meet her — there’s no kind of coming of age.
“She’s good at what she does, she’s intelligent and she’s unapologetic about it.
“She’s a boss, she’s a badass and I wanted to do it, so I fought really hard for it.
“People ask me, ‘Oh, you like playing strong women?’. But I have never met a woman who isn’t strong,
“I’ve never met a two-dimensional woman, so I just find it realistic.
“I don’t see why I should accept playing that character if it’s just not real.
“Every woman I’ve met is complicated and vulnerable and crazy and kind, and everything in between.”
- Waitrose’s Dish podcast is available to listen to now.
