Kaya Scodelario: ‘I’d held it in for 12 years’

“We’re very close. Creepily so. We’ve been through huge life experiences together,” Scodelario says of her two “fams”. She broke the news of Kaluuya’s recent Golden Globe nomination to him via the WhatsApp group. “I texted, ‘Daniel! Golden Globe!’ And he said, ‘I’m standing outside Pret a Manger.’ ”

With Aidan Gillen in Maze Runner: The Death Cure

Not that she’s in the shadow of her neon-lit peers. The 25-year-old has sprung from Holloway to Hollywood via a combination of talent (she matched Johnny Depp quip for quip in the last Pirates of the Caribbean film, Dead Men Tell No Tales, and played a raw, intense Cathy in Andrea Arnold’s very modern take on Wuthering Heights) and honesty (she admitted that she hadn’t read Emily Brontë’s novel before that film). She’s tough (she grew up in a council flat, the daughter of a Brazilian single mother) and she’s brave (she recently tweeted about the sexual abuse she endured as a 12-year-old).

In an era dominated by Eton-schooled smoothies, how refreshing to meet a proudly working-class actress with no formal training and a hard edge to go with the charm. Dressed in a striped silk blouse and leather skirt, Scodelario is chic while swearing like a navvy throughout our interview and calling me “mate” and “darling”.

The Death Cure is a solid end to the Maze Runner saga — well, as solid as a teens-in-zombie-apocalypse flick can be. Scodelario’s character, Teresa, has a satisfying arc (she’s a goodie turned baddie who’s looking for a cure to the zombie virus) and there are some tasty action set pieces and topical winks (the draconian rulers are separated from the zombies by a very big wall).

With The Hunger Games done and the Divergent series stranded in development hell, could this be a swansong for the YA phenomenon? “I hope not. I’m really proud to be part of almost a new genre of film. We’re still making superhero movies, we’re still making rom-coms, why should this end?”

YA films resonated, Scodelario thinks, because of their inclusivity: they had racially diverse casts and strong female characters long before #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo. Scodelario convenes a women writers’ group in her local pub and would like to produce films with all-female crews. In October she expressed her solidarity with #MeToo by posting a series of tweets about being sexually abused by an unnamed man when she was 12.

“To everyone still suffering silently, you never asked for it. NOBODY DOES,” she wrote. “It’s taken me 13 years to say #MeToo. He is still protected by ‘family members’ in Brazil. They’ve told lies to papers to try to silence me,” she added, presumably referring to claims from her Brazilian relatives that her success had gone to her head and that she had refused to help to pay for treatment for her sick grandmother, which she denies.

Scodelario doesn’t want to go into more detail about the abuse, but says that posting the tweets was “something I’m very proud of, the scariest thing I’ve ever done. It was something I’d held in for 12 years and managed to feel guilty for. If at 12 I could have seen someone I’d admired who’d been in the same situation and they’d still had a voice, maybe that would have made me less depressed.”

Given her experiences, the recent allegations against Depp and Geoffrey Rush, her Pirates of the Caribbean co-stars, must have been particularly disturbing. Depp’s former wife Amber Heard claimed in court papers that he had been abusive, although she later issued a joint statement with him stating that “there was never any physical or emotional harm”. Rush stepped down as the president of Australia’s screen industry academy. He described the unspecified allegations as “untenable” and no details have been given.

Scodelario says she wasn’t aware of the respective allegations when she played Carina Barbossa, the ballsy daughter of Rush’s sea dog, in the Pirates film. Depp and Rush behaved well around her. Depp remains a divisive figure, though. JK Rowling has received flak for backing his appearance in the next Fantastic Beasts film. I ask Scodelario if she sympathises with that criticism.

Enter, as if by Rowling-esque magic, a publicist. “I’m sorry, we need to move on,” he says. It’s a relevant question, I protest, adding that I understand why Scodelario might be worried about commenting on a big star like Depp. “I’m not worried about it,” she says. “I just don’t know [about the veracity of the allegations].”

She knows that her tweets about being abused will set the agenda in interviews. “I will be asked about this for the rest of my life now. I have to accept that.”

Would she appear in another Pirates film? “It depends where they want to take [Carina]. It would be cool to take over from Geoffrey and be the new Captain Barbossa. But I’ve not heard anything.” Would the presence of Depp be a problem? “I don’t think so.”

Scodelario does admit to initial awkwardness about the age difference between her and Depp. When she was offered the role, she asked if she was going to be his love interest. “That’s what I expected, which is sad. Is this guy who’s twice my age going to be someone I have to kiss? Fortunately that wasn’t the situation with that movie, but I’ve been offered projects with an actor playing my father and then played in a movie afterwards where he’s played my boyfriend.”

The age gap between Scodelario and her real-life husband, the American actor Benjamin Walker (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), is a less queasy ten years. They married in 2015 and recently moved with their one year-old son to Crouch End in north London, to be near her mother. Her new home is just up the road from where she went to school, where she struggled with dyslexia and was bullied for being “painfully thin, flat-chested and very shy”.

If Scodelario’s ascent from there has a whiff of the fairytale, wait till you learn how she and Walker got together. They had been starring in The King’s Daughter, an as-yet-unreleased historical fantasy featuring Louis XIV of France and, erm, a sea monster. The script called for their characters to kiss.

“We were joking about it beforehand, saying we were going to eat a ton of garlic. But it was the cheesiest thing in the world: we both went, ‘Shit, I think I felt something then,’ ” she says. Weeks later Walker came to London to reshoot some scenes. “He said, ‘I really missed you,’ and I said, ‘Shit, I really missed you too.’ ”

As an American, Walker is puzzled by the class system and has helped Scodelario to battle her sense of inferiority. “People who grew up the way I grew up shouldn’t be doing this,” she says. “I remember going for an audition for Emma at the BBC and seeing all these gorgeous, blonde, very well-spoken, skinny girls and I ran out crying. I didn’t feel I was good enough.”

She probably doesn’t need to audition these days. “Oh mate, I still audition!” she says with a laugh. “I still grovel.” Next up is Die in a Gunfight (“a rock’n’roll Romeo and Juliet”) and in the meantime there’s childcare and roast dinners with her “Skins fam”.

They talk a lot about why the show produced so many high achievers. Authenticity was a big part of it, she thinks. Like their characters, they were normal teenagers, “falling in love, having fights, falling out, leaving home. Skins was our uni,” she says. “And it motivated us. We had an opportunity to work on something dense and good, so we were never going to go back to something shitty.”
Maze Runner: The Death Cure is on general release