I’m lucky to have worked with directors who encouraged my creativity: British actress Kaya Scodelario

British actress Kaya Scodelario is going places.

Kaya started her career on popular British teen drama Skins (the show that was instrumental in launching the acting careers of Dev Patel, Daniel Kaluuya, and Nicholas Hoult to name a few). And she’s been hard at work making a mark in Hollywood ever since.

She’s arguably most known for the Maze Runner trilogy, followed by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, the newest addition to the swashbuckling franchise. More recently she led the Sam Raimi-produced creature feature Crawl, and will now be seen taking over the reins from Milla Jovovich as the lead of the newly-rebooted Resident Evil franchise, with the upcoming prequel film Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City. 

Over Zoom, Kaya spoke to me about navigating Hollywood, the logistics of fighting zombies onset, and more.

Edited Excerpts:

As you’d hope Resident Evil: Welcome To Racoon City has a lot of zombies and zombie killing. Are those big action sequences as fun to shoot as they are to watch? Is killing zombies on set as fun as it is on screen?

It’s definitely slower (laughs). But I would say it is just as fun. I really enjoy doing all the action stuff, and it’s really great when you play pretend with real zombies. They are in makeup and do have blood running down their faces, so you very quickly forget that it isn’t real.

But I’m guessing there are times when you’re fighting something imaginary. Just like with your last horror film Crawl, even here for much of the time you’re reacting to things that aren’t actually there. Is there an art to getting that right?

Yeah definitely. I think what I try to do is just resign myself to going back to being a little kid and using my imagination. It really is an adult version of pretend play. And you know sometimes you may not have a real monster there, but you do have a really large stunt man dressed in green lycra from head to toe which can also be very scary in its own way (laughs).

With Resident Evil, luckily, we had an amazing make-up department that really did a great job with the zombies so it was very easy to believe that they were real and posed a genuine threat.

And a lot of the time, the trick to it really is just turning back into a six-year-old and embracing the craziness of it.

It’s gotta be tough though when you’re on break and you just see a zombie in the corner eating a sandwich…

It’s very odd. The strangest is the toilets. When there’s a queue of zombies outside the portable toilets, that’s the weirdest site I’ve ever seen.

Many of us have seen you as Effy in Skins and you’ve had a really inspiring journey ever since, now leading these big blockbusters. If you could go back in time before all this and give yourself one piece of advice about navigating Hollywood, what would it be? 

I think it would definitely be to stand up for myself a little more and be more assertive. All the great actors I’ve worked with have been unafraid to say when they want their character to be better or be real or fight harder. I think when we started on Skins we had no idea about the industry or what we’re capable of, we were just grateful to be working. So, there were times when I let people talk over me or I didn’t express my ideas enough. But I’ve been lucky ever since because I’ve worked with amazing directors and producers who have encouraged my creativity and allowed me to collaborate with them and I think that’s something every young actor should do.

Suchin Mehrotra is a film journalist and movie junkie who sincerely believes movies can change the world. You can find him on Twitter at @suchin545.

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