Kaya saw the completed film the night before our interview. “I hate watching myself,” she says.“It’s weird. It doesn’t get any easier. It’s a very personal thing. You kind of want to do the film and then forget about it, and then you see it again a year later and you end up hating yourself.”
It’s a recurring theme for her: doubt, panic, the fear that somehow she can’t do it. “I cry, I want to go home, I feel uncomfortable,” she says of the first day on a new shoot, or of having to attend premieres. When, as a 14-year-old, she got to the Skins audition, she lost her nerve and decided against going in. Calming herself, she lit up a 8)fag and got talking to another guy. It was Bryan Elsley, one of the show’s creators. He must have seen the way she can roll her eyes as she blows out smoke. He must have seen that layer of attitude and core of vulnerability. He cast her as Effy straight away.
Yet the same thing happened on the day of her Wuthering Heights audition; Kaya freaked out and turned her phone off, missing her slot. Arnold saw something in her and cast her anyway (with Carey Mulligan, Gemma Arterton and Keira Knightley all rumoured to be in the running), and Kaya responded with a performance hair-raising in its 9)intensity and as wild as the 10)moors, in which pain, anger, obsessive love and betrayal are all communicated through purposeful strides, lingering looks and stares off into the horizon, wisps of her hair flying in the wind. “I feel electric, so alive, really free when I’m performing,”she says.
But she was glad, as she always is, to get back to “the rough bit” of Holloway Road. Kaya sees herself as a Londoner, before anything else. “It’s an instinctive thing,” she says. When she was going out with her Skins co-star Jack O’Connell, she spent two years living in Glossop, the small Pennine town near Manchester. “I just couldn’t do it. I needed the big city,” she says.“I’d sit there and think about it. I got the train back every weekend.”
The only other place that holds a sense of belonging for her is Brazil. “My instincts are Brazilian,” she says. “I have the polite, quiet English side, but I’m fiery like a Brazilian.”She has a sprawling family in Rio and when she visits, “I just feel like it’s my culture, like I fit.”