Run, Don't Walk

Skins’ hedonistic teen has navigated the world of Hollywood blockbusters and become a mother – all by 24. Kaya Scodelario tells us why she’s always been a force to be reckoned with

- Martha Hayes

Kaya Scodelario’s performance in the recently released Maze Runner: The Death Cure is impressive. But when you consider that she had given birth to her first child just two months before filming started and was breastfeeding or pumping milk every four hours throughout 18-hour days on set, having relocated to Cape Town for three months, it starts to feel less impressive and, well, more superhuman. Not that Scodelario sees it that way at all.

‘One day I whipped my tit out and put the breast pump on and was like [to her Maze Runner co-stars Dylan O’Brien and Thomas Brodie-Sangster], “Boys, you’re going to have to deal with this,”’ she says in her north London accent, shrugging. ‘No one was weird about it. They know me well enough to know that I would have punched them if they were.’

Normalising breastfeeding was the 25-year-old’s schtick on set of the final movie in the blockbusting action trilogy, and something she often shares with her 1.4m Instagram followers. ‘I mean, you’re doing it 17 times a day – it’s bloody normal. I’m so grateful I’m able to, when many women struggle. It was very hard with the movie, but I was insistent on having a ten minute break every four hours to pump.’

I can’t help thinking that the assertive, ambitious and outspoken artist formerly known as Effy from Skins (the cult E4 teen drama that launched a legion of British stars from Nicholas Hoult to Dev Patel), who holds her own as the female lead of a male-dominated multimillion-pound action movie franchise, is exactly what Hollywood, post #MeToo, needs.