In partnership with Burberry
There is a crispness to London in the spring. The kind of softness that feels cinematic if you catch it at the right time of morning – all light leaks and long shadows, the promise of possibility stitched into the air. Eliza Scanlen caught it. She rode her bike through the quiet streets of North London to a studio just blocks from home to shoot our latest digital cover story. It felt romantic, she says. Not in the prescribed, cinematic way, but in the kind that makes you linger in the moment, that makes you want to hold a frame a little longer – the kind that makes you talk about film projects mid-way through a costume change.
We’re speaking just after that shoot. It was a soft-lit morning spent in a light-filled studio with a compact team – the kind of set where people talk more than they pose. Shooting on film, Scanlen reflects “we were trying to capture something authentic and effortless. Not too stylised.” She was mid-pitch between frames, workshopping directing ideas with the team while being photographed. “It felt like I was in a meeting – just one where I happened to be in character.”
That duality – the push and pull between becoming and disappearing – seems to be where Scanlen feels most alive. She is an actor who knows how to lose herself, and a director who knows when to step back. Between roles, between the stage and screen, between continents. She’s just finished a theatre run of The Importance of Being Earnest, a production that demanded everything of her: physical comedy, iconic text, and the responsibility of holding joy in her body for an audience each night. “You have to get close to yourself to play a character,” she says. “A lot of people think it’s about transforming, but I think you actually get closer to who you are.”
“I was reading this amazing acting, theatre, directing book before I started the rehearsal, called Different Every Night, and it talked about the instinct we sometimes have as actors to change the character, or change the text, to make your version feel more original. But a lot of the time, the most original way you can do that version of the character is by sticking to the text religiously and just trusting that you and your unique self will make something original out of the character.”
Costume, in her world, is a portal – one that allows her to slip into someone else, but also one that asks her to stay grounded in herself. “In theatre, you have more autonomy,” she tells me. “You’re asked for your opinion, and I found that quite intimidating at first… I got to suggest colours, add grass stains to boots, even wake up the fabric a little. It makes you feel a sense of ownership.”
Film is different. It's less collaborative in that way, and yet Scanlen still finds ways to preserve something of herself inside the frame. Her work in the new series Dope Girls is a masterclass in restraint. Her character, Violet, is sharp and soft-edged in equal parts, a woman guarded by the kind of past the audience is only ever allowed to intuit. “She doesn’t give much away,” Scanlen says. “But the people who say the least often have the most going on.”
“I wanted to play with that. There was a lot of background and world building that I did for myself, to play Violet, that the audience never sees. It was a new kind of challenge, and there’s a darkness to her character, but at her core, her motivation is survival.”
What struck me most in our conversation is how often Scanlen returned to the idea of joy – not just as an emotional note, but as an artistic obligation. “I think actors are always asked to go to the dark places,” she says. “But bringing joy to an audience every night – that’s powerful too.”
She speaks with the intentionality of someone who’s thinking in shots and sequences. Which makes sense, because she’s not just acting anymore – she’s directing. I’m most interested in the way Scanlen talks about her film ideas – like how someone might talk about a memory they’re not quite finished living. “There’s this one idea,” she says, half hesitant, half electric. “It sounds ridiculous in my head. But I had to test the room, so I pitched it to the team on set yesterday.”
When the conversation turns to legacy, she doesn’t overreach. There’s no manifesto. “I hope the work I do brings something to people,” she says simply. But there’s something more layered in the way she speaks about the enduring impact of theatre, and the fleeting alchemy of a screen role. “I’ve just been lucky to work with auteurs, to learn on sets where storytelling matters. And to be reminded that laughter – joy – can be just as important as catharsis.”
It’s why pieces like The Importance of Being Earnest endure. And it’s why certain garments – ones like the Burberry trench – are passed down across generations with the same reverence we reserve for memory. Scanlen’s mother has one – a piece she “hopes to inherit”. That signature check lining, the soft gabardine shell, the storm flaps and epaulettes that have weathered more than just English rain. Designed in 1912 by Thomas Burberry and steeped in over a century of craftsmanship, the trench coat has lived many lives – from military issue to cinematic icon. On the shoot, it was both prop and portal, a quiet symbol of endurance and inherited elegance.
In the spirit of inherited memories, Scanlen begins to imagine what she might leave for a future wearer to discover in the pocket of her favourite Burberry trench. “Take this wherever you go. It’ll be your trusty companion.”
And perhaps that’s the quiet thread in all of it. For a girl who moves through cities and roles with the same sense of curiosity – who finds herself in the doing – it feels like a note she’s already living by.
