Kaya Scodelario: after the maze, the empire

Kaya Scodelario

Photo: Desmond Herzfelder / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 13, 1992 Haywards Heath, West Sussex, England
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Maze Runner, Moon, Maze Runner: The Death Cure
Awards	2 Golden Nymph , Monte-Carlo TV Festival (nomination) · Best Acting , Ashland Independent Film Festival (shared)

The question her career keeps asking is not whether she can carry a film. She proved that solo in a Louisiana flood, with alligators and a broken father and nothing else to hold the screen — Crawl worked because Kaya Scodelario refused to let it not. The question is whether the industry would eventually give her room to be interesting rather than just useful. Susie Glass, the crime boss at the centre of Guy Ritchie‘s The Gentlemen — which returned for a second season on Netflix on 3 September 2026 — is the most complete answer she has delivered so far.

She was born Kaya Rose Humphrey in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, and grew up bilingual in north London, her mother Katia having left Brazil for England in 1990. The family settled in a council flat on Holloway Road, and Scodelario absorbed two cultures and two languages simultaneously — a split she has described as formative in ways she didn’t fully understand until much later. Her father Roger Humphrey died in November 2010, by which point she had already been working professionally for three years. Drama at Islington Arts and Media School was not a hobby; it was the first place where she felt she had standing that she hadn’t had to negotiate.

She auditioned for Skins at fourteen with no prior credits and landed Effy Stonem, a character introduced as a near-silent background figure and gradually rewritten into the gravitational centre of the show. What Scodelario did with Effy — turning near-wordless scenes into exercises in controlled unease — earned her two Golden Nymph nominations and the kind of attention that casting directors don’t forget. By the time Skins ended its run, she was twenty and had demonstrated something that a series of supporting roles in bigger films would spend the next several years making harder to see.

The transition to film was swift and, in retrospect, structurally awkward. Wuthering Heights (2011), Andrea Arnold’s formally ambitious adaptation, cast her as Catherine Earnshaw and earned genuine critical notice — but it was a film that arrived without an audience large enough to give her the traction the role warranted. Then came the franchise years: Teresa across three Maze Runner films (2014–2018), Carina Smyth in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017). Both series generated enormous box office and left their female leads with less to do than the story architecture implied.

The work she chose between and around those franchise obligations told a different story. In Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019), she played Carole Ann Boone opposite Zac Efron‘s Ted Bundy — a role that required her to render a woman’s catastrophic blind faith in a murderer without turning her into a symbol of naivety. The same year, Alexandre Aja’s Crawl handed her an alligator-survival thriller and essentially dared her to keep it from being ridiculous. She didn’t just succeed — she made it genuinely frightening. Netflix’s Spinning Out (2020), in which she played a figure skater navigating a mood disorder through an Olympic-level competitive season, was cancelled after one series but showed a range her franchise credits never asked for.

There is a specific frustration worth naming about the Maze Runner years: Teresa is, in James Dashner’s source novels, the character whose moral complexity most complicates the story’s binary logic. On screen, the films progressively narrowed her until she functioned primarily as a figure of betrayal. Scodelario has spoken candidly about the limitations — the obligation to service a plot rather than a character. The films made money; the role did not make her. Being visible in the wrong kind of project for eight years is its own specific risk, distinct from obscurity and sometimes harder to recover from.

Susie Glass arrived in 2024 and changed the frame. Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series cast her as the daughter of a crime boss trying to hold an inherited empire together alongside the aristocrat — Theo James‘s Eddie Horniman — who stumbled into owning it. The Gentlemen Season 2, released on 3 September 2026, extends the story to Italy and raises the stakes on both characters. The show gave Scodelario what the franchise years didn’t: a part that is as funny as it is threatening, and a creative context — Ritchie’s heightened, mannered crime-comedy idiom — that turns her precision into a weapon rather than a liability.

She was married to American actor Benjamin Walker from December 2015; they separated in early 2024. They have two children. In 2018, she spoke publicly about having been sexually assaulted at the age of twelve — a disclosure she framed as an act of solidarity rather than personal confession, situated in the context of an industry that had been examining its own failures.

The dark comedy Adulthood, directed by Alex Winter and co-starring Josh Gad and Billie Lourd, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025 — a film in which she plays a woman unravelling a lethal family secret, and which critics called a showcase for what she can do when given material that keeps pace with her. The second season of The Gentlemen is the season that will determine whether Susie Glass becomes the role she is known for. Everything in the record suggests she knows exactly what to do with that.

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Tags: actors, actresses, British cinema, Guy Ritchie, Theo James, The Gentlemen, Kaya Scodelario

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