32

ANDREA ARNOLD SELECTS

AND WUTHERING HEIGHTS kaya scodelario

THE MISSING LINK BETWEEN SKINS

DAZED

Filmmaker Andrea Arnold: “I’d seen Kaya on a casting tape and I thought she had something that felt right for Cathy. I went to meet her in a very tall building in London with beautiful views, and she was sitting there gazing out the window and I just thought yes, immediately, before I even spoke to her. We never did an audition. I always trust my first instinct, so that was it.”

When Kaya Scodelario’s agent first suggested that she try out for the part of Cathy in Andrea Arnold’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Scodelario didn’t think she could pull it off. “I remember going for an audition at the BBC for another period drama, and all the girls sat there were blonde, perfect, delicate and very posh, and I just wasn’t that,” she asserts. “Then I watched Fish Tank, and thought, ‘OK, this is going to be different.’” Scodelario was right. Depicting the tragic love affair between Cathy and her fostered brother Heathcliff, Arnold’s Wuthering Heights takes a decidedly gritty and unorthodox approach to the story. It features James Howson as Heathcliff, who was discovered after he accompanied a friend to the film’s open auditions, and hit the headlines for being the first black actor to play the role. “James wouldn’t speak to me for the first two weeks, he was very shy,” explains Scodelario. “You’ve got to think, he’d spent his whole life on an estate in Leeds and then all of a sudden he was on the moors in period costume riding a horse.”

Scodelario was also discovered through open auditions aged 14 when she won the part of the deeply troubled Effy in the TV series Skins. During the first season, her character was famously mute, but her role grew in the second before carrying the series through seasons three and four. The gradual introduction must have suited Scodelario just fine, given that by her own admission she “never had any confidence as a child”. Describing her experience working on Skins as “pure fun – I honestly cannot call it work because it was just madness”, the actress admits to hitting a low point in its aftermath. “I didn’t work for a year and went into a depressed zone. I was scared nothing was ever going to happen again.”

Although initially sceptical about the role of Cathy, Scodelario discovered she could pour her own life experience into Wuthering Heights, an organic technique which hasn’t failed the untrained actress yet. “I thought, ‘I don’t know anything about Cathy, I can’t relate to her’ – but then I looked into the story. She loves Heathcliff so much that it deeply hurts her. At that time in my life a really bad relationship was coming to an end and it was such a good way to focus all that energy.” So what is it about Kaya Scodelario that keeps landing her roles that veer towards the self-destructive? “I dunno,” she laughs. “Do I look like a bit of a fuckhead?”

Text FIONA COOK Photography fabiEn kruszelnicki