Scodelario admits teen years felt more adult than now

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 club 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."

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.