Season Of The Witch

Actress Freya Allan may be a relative newcomer, but a lead role opposite Henry Cavill in Netflix’s The Witcher looks set to catapult her into the major league.

- Huma Humayun

Seventeen-year-old Freya Allan is fresh from the set of her shoot with Schön!, an experience she found unexpectedly enjoyable. Although a self-confessed fan of fashion, she admits that photo shoots are a relatively new thing for her. “With the ones I’ve done before, you’re in a studio, standing in front of a piece of paper and that’s it – you’ve just got to pose,” she says, “but this was in a setting, almost like acting and getting into character. It was so much fun.”

Getting into character is something Allan has no problem doing; her passion for acting began early. Not content with playing a ‘baddie’ in her primary school nativity play, Allan talked her way into a more sympathetic version of the role. “I had a big line where I would say, ‘My name is Sally the Wolf and I’m a vegetarian.’ I remember everyone in the audience laughing. Something from that – the reception to the performance – made me always enjoy being on stage.” Although her great-great-grandmother had been a successful stage actress, Allan did not hail from a theatrical family. It was her own teenage tenacity that put her where she is now. Aged 14, she mass-emailed agents, she tells us, “listing every part in every school play I’d been in, from ‘Mushroom No. 1’ to Antipholus in Comedy of Errors. I felt so proud of myself.”