On my radar: Kaya Scodelario’s cultural highlights
Born in West Sussex in 1992 and raised in London, Brazilian-British actor Kaya Scodelario rose to prominence playing Effy Stonem in E4’s Skins. In 2011, she played Cathy in Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights; her other film roles include the Maze Runner series, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and This Is Christmas. Last year, she starred in two Netflix series, Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen and the dual-language biographical miniseries Senna. Scodelario makes her stage debut in East Is South, a play about artificial intelligence at the Hampstead theatre from 7 February to 15 March. She lives in north London with her two children.
1. Music
She’s an incredible songwriter. She’s only 26, which I find hard to believe, because her lyrics and her voice seem so soulful and of another time. She seems to not conform in a way that most singers do nowadays, and I find that inspiring. I also think she’s starting a really healthy dialogue between fans and their idols and what that means, and what the boundaries are. My three-year-old daughter loves Pink Pony Club and sings it every day on the way to nursery, so it’s a nice memory for me whenever I hear it.
2. Book
I picked this up at the Science Museum gift shop – I was looking for materials to research AI for the play. Supremacy tells the story of the rivalry between the two wealthy men who came up with the idea for AI – OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis – and the different moral compasses they adhere to. I’m trying to hold on to the idea that as humans, there must be something about us that can’t be replaced: the thing that makes us creative and that makes us love and hate and hurt. I hope that is fundamentally a human thing.
3. TV
I’m a 90s kid. I grew up watching Gladiators, back when there were only four-and-a-half channels – you could sometimes get Channel 5 if you smacked the top of the TV hard enough. I loved the storylines, the melodrama, the competitiveness; I loved the women, who were strong and fierce and beautiful. I’m absolutely obsessed with the new reboot. They’ve updated it for our times, but they’ve kept the nostalgia and the fun. I’m now watching it with my kids, and they’re doing the moves of the various Gladiators during the opening credits. And I also really fancy Legend.
4. Food
Braseef Brazilian Butcher, Turnpike Lane, north London
London has many wonderful restaurants, but my favourite thing to do when I get home from a long shoot abroad is to cook the food that I grew up with, which is Brazilian cuisine. I make a weekly feijoada, which is a black bean stew with various different cuts of pork, and brigadeiro, which is a kind of chocolate fudge ball. Braseef is a hub for Brazilians in north London. They do the most gorgeous cuts of Brazilian beef and meat, and they have a hot counter of little savoury snacks where you can get coxinhas and pastels, and they’re just absolutely delicious.
5. Place
This is an old railway line that’s been converted into a nature reserve – they’ve just allowed the wildlife to grow around it. If I feel as if I’ve been stuck in a character and I need to recentre, I’ll go for a long walk from Finsbury Park all the way up to Highgate woods and then into The Woodman pub for a roast on a Sunday. There’s a famous sculpture called the Spriggan, who is a mythical north London folklore creature. There’s also a bat cave at the end of it. It’s just a tiny slice of countryside in the middle of London.
6. Theatre
Really Good Exposure, Soho theatre (17-18 Feb)
This is a one-woman show by Megan Prescott, which explores how we treat those who are paid to perform: actors v sex workers, jobbing actors v nepo babies. I was on Skins with Megan, and she’s taken our experiences of being teenagers on a show that was hyper-sexualised, and her unique experience of going on to be a sex worker. The show asks the question: when an actor takes her sexuality into her own hands and profits from it directly, why is that seen as wrong? I saw it at the Edinburgh fringe last year and I’m really proud of her.
