As Johnny Depp’s new leading lady, British beauty Kaya Scodelario plays a strong-willed woman who is no one’s damsel in distress.
But the star of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, today reveals she was once a tormented schoolgirl wracked by fear and anxiety before acting turned her life around.
“I was incredibly insecure as a child,” says Kaya, 25, who got her screen start 10 years ago through teen TV drama Skins.
“I was bullied. Dyslexic. It really affected my self-esteem. I went through a year of hating myself. I was bullied to the point of having to change schools.”
Classmates even taunted Kaya because her dad had walked out when she was one.
“I was the daughter of an immigrant, a single parent,” says Kaya, who was raised alone by her Brazilian mother in a council flat in Islington, North London.
“I had no idea what I was going to do in life. I had no ambition.”
But that all changed when she plucked up courage to try her hand at public speaking at school. Kaya was transformed.
“The first time I ever stood up in class in front of everyone, I loved it – embodying a character so different to myself,” she says. “I’ve been fortunate enough to make a career out of it.”
Yet when it came to appearing in the Pirates franchise, her old insecurities returned while shooting a scene where she and Depp are on the gallows.
“We had 500 extras, animals, kids, and we’re about to be executed and we decide to have an argument,” she says. “I got to scream at 600 people to ‘shut up!’ which I was so nervous about, as I’ve never done stage or theatre and I get incredibly insecure about public situations.
“It was like this cool learning curve of being on show, having to just own it, go for it, and act like an idiot. I really enjoyed it.”
Kaya was only 14 when she made her acting debut as manipulative teen tearaway Effy Stonem in Skins.
The Channel 4 drama also launched the careers of Dev Patel, Nicholas Hoult, and Jack O’Connell who Kaya dated for a year before they split in 2009.
“I grew up in a very working class neighbourhood,” she says. “A lot of my earnings from Skins went on bills and getting us a new sofa.”
She quit the show after four seasons and appeared in indie films including Moon and Wuthering Heights before finding Hollywood stardom in sci-fi thriller The Maze Runner and its sequel, with a third due next year.
But despite all her experience, Kaya admits feeling weak at the knees when filming began on Pirates.
“I’d met Johnny Depp, at the table read, but when he came on set dressed as Jack Sparrow, that was it – I was a little kid again. I was more starstruck by Jack Sparrow than I was by Johnny Depp.”
Filming in Australia opposite Depp, 54, and swashbuckling cut-throats played by Geoffrey Rush, 65, and Javier Bardem, 48, left Kaya in awe. “You look around on set and think: Oh, three Oscars. It’s crazy,” she says.
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