Rewrite
Wonderland sits down with the two-time BIFA nominee to discuss her biggest role to date: starring alongside Joseph Quinn in Luna Carmoon’s guttural directorial debut, Hoard.
Hoard is the type of film that makes it tricky to understand what it is actually about. On the surface, the story follows a woman who suffers with hoarding disorder, before traversing time to document the struggles that the condition brings to her daughter in the years after. But behind the curtain, when you’ve fished out the red herring and re-flung your bait into the murky pond, what do you see? What do you feel? Is it about love? Grief? Parenting? Friendship? Even for its leading actor, the film’s meaning is enigmatic, and most certainly evolving. “Finding a restorative tenderness towards a traumatised childhood,” Saura Lightfoot-Leon shrugs with an assuredness that falls short of ubiquity. “It’s finding a way to move forward, it’s finding a way to release everything that might be held.”
Luna Carmoon’s debut feature is a totemic splash of colour on the blank-ish canvas of the Dutch-born, London-based actor’s embryonic career. Lightfoot-Leon’s raw, permissive and unguarded performance as the teenage Maria, whom we meet a third-or-so into the film’s duration as the narrative shifts timeframe and perspective, has earned her comprehensive acclaim, and two nominations at this year’s BIFA Awards for Breakthrough Performance and Best Joint Lead Performance (opposite Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn) respectively. Considering the sparsity of her filmography prior to Hoard—a smattering of shorts, a cameo in Apple TV’s Masters of the Air—it’s a highly commendable feat. “I didn’t really think about it,” the 26-year-old says on her disillusionment with awards-and-the-like. “I knew what we were making was really special, but I was still very fresh at the time to all of this, so I was very naive. I didn’t know what BIFA was, honestly [laughs]. I was just thinking about telling a story, and it meant that I knew that whatever we were making would have some sort of impact. I’m very grateful that the film is getting the recognition it deserves.”
Lightfoot-Leon speaks from a window-side desk, with the twinkling morning light like a mirror to the effervescence that bleeds through her computer screen. Capacious and generous in conversation, the actor shares delicate analogies through an accent without borders, a characteristic carved from the motley nature of a childhood spent jotting around disparate circumferences. “I had a very particular upbringing because my parents were choreographers and dancers,” she offers. “I lived almost like a circus life, traveling the world with them, with a company. The people I grew up around are dancers. And if you go to a studio or you go to a theatre or you meet dancers, you’ll get that it’s a very specific language. It is body language.”
The influence of dance oozes into Lightfoot-Leon’s turn as Maria. Hoard is rooted in the physicality of her performance; a skittish vitality struck by instinctive desperation. There was a “feral quality” that the actor and her director developed, which began from the first time that she and Carmoon met in person. “It was my second audition, and we were having so much fun,” she recalls. “It was improvised and I was doing crazy stuff. I remember being on the floor and them videoing me, and Luna would just throw situations at me and I would react, but it was very childlike and had this element of animalism. It just came naturally to me. I’m someone who always lives very physically anyway so I bring that with me to roles.”
The small troop of people that she was nestled within during an intensive six week filming period brought out the best in Lightfoot-Leon. “There’s this vibrational energy that you create when it’s a really tight ensemble, and there’s trust and playfulness,” she says of a cast that features fellow newcomer Deba Hekmat as Maria’s friend Laraib and Sex Education’s Samantha Spiro as her adoptive carer. The biggest coup for the film though, is the acquisition of Hollywood’s new poster boy, Joseph Quinn, who found time to star opposite Lightfoot-Leon amidst filming for Gladiator II and A Quiet Place: Day One. And it is in the chemistry between the two stars that allows the film the most air to breathe, and room to explore. Almost Heathcliff and Cathy-esque, the brute and somatic intimacy of the two characters is guided and gestated by their shared trauma, and communicated through a lens of a coalescing ambition to liberate their inner child.
“You have to have a willingness, an element of like: ‘Let’s just go for it, fuck it’,” Lightfoot-Leon says on diving headfirst into the complexity of the two characters’ relationship, and her own bond with Quinn. “I think that’s very important in acting in general, you have to throw yourself in. From the first moment I met Joe, it was fun but it was a bit out there. We started off with a chemistry read, you know, niceties, sitting in chairs and reading. And I told him, ‘Please, feel free to fuck with me,’ and he was like ‘Yeah yeah yeah, all right.’ And then what happened is that I started to fuck with him and then he actually genuinely got pissed off [laughs]. You don’t nurture chemistry, you don’t make it in a bottle. The nurturing of it was also just spending time on set. Luna created a wonderful environment for us to spend time with each other a little bit but then it was mixed with work, so it was like getting to know each other personally but also it did feel very professional.”
For her debut leading role, Lightfoot-Leon truly gave her all. She plunged headfirst into Maria throughout the month and a half shoot, staying in character and keeping her imagined counterpart’s South London inflections—even to Carmoon. Method acting was something that she felt compelled to do for this particular role, but in reflection, feels that such a commitment isn’t necessary for each project she becomes attached to. “I was completely immersed,” she remembers. “We filmed an insane amount of footage in six weeks, and I was on it for most of the time. The structure of it made me want to throw myself in. I stayed in the accent the whole time because I was so scared that I was gonna get it wrong. I really wanted to make sure that I was getting everything as right as I could, and I gave a lot. I look back and I’m like ‘Wow, I really went there.’ I didn’t plan it, I just cared so much about the project and meeting Luna and the cast and crew, it felt that everyone was giving a lot, so I felt a need to give everything. Afterwards, I got withdrawal symptoms, suddenly being disconnected from all these people I’d been around for so long. That was my first time really experiencing that, and I don’t think every project has to be like that. Because in the end, you give away a part of yourself and it doesn’t require that. You need stamina as an actor.”
A career on the screen is a marathon not a sprint, and since the flourishing success of Hoard, the rising actor’s opportunities have spread across the embryonic miles of her odyssey. Early in 2025, she’ll be featuring in Netflix action drama American Primeval, but first, she is currently starring in Showtime’s espionage thriller The Agency alongside Michael Fassbender, Richard Gere and Jodie Turner-Smith. ”There were all of these wonderful people who are big dogs and I’m there like ‘woof’,” she giggles on the cast. “But in a beautiful way. I didn’t feel too intimidated, I just felt excited. I love a challenge and I love projects that scare me, that’s why I take jobs.” Her character, Danny, is a young covert trainee, whose arc takes her from a fresh and talented new recruit to depths that she didn’t know she was capable of. “I’ve been very lucky with the jobs I’ve gotten,” Lightfoot-Leon says. “They’ve all been extremely different—different time periods, different accents, different young women who are strong and vulnerable in different ways. It’s wonderful because I get to explore different versions of me, and I think with The Agency, this is the job that has been, ironically, most like me in some ways. Because the job of a covert agent is to find different masks of yourself and present them and get good at it. And that’s my job as an actor; I present different versions of myself under imaginary circumstances.”
Though accolades are far from her incentive, if Saura Lightfoot-Leon does pick up one or both of the BIFA awards on Sunday (8th December) it’ll be a just reward for her towering yet diaphanous interpretation of her on-screen oddball Maria. And with her reputation growing at a quickening pace and her coterie of collaborations ever more eye-raising, she best get used to seeing her name pulled out of an envelope to symphonies of applause. But for Saura, there must be balance; there’s life beyond the lens, after all. “I’m really happy to have time to do my life stuff and that’s something I’m really prioritising at the moment,” she beams before we part ways. “I really value my life and my friendships and my family and my health. And I think a healthy way to be is to sometimes press pause and say, ‘I just want to make spaghetti tonight’.” Bolognese or carbonara?
Photography by Dillon Rana
Words by Ben Tibbits
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Wonderland sits down with the two-time BIFA nominee to discuss her biggest role to date: starring alongside Joseph Quinn in Luna Carmoon’s guttural directorial debut, Hoard.
Hoard is the type of film that makes it tricky to understand what it is actually about. On the surface, the story follows a woman who suffers with hoarding disorder, before traversing time to document the struggles that the condition brings to her daughter in the years after. But behind the curtain, when you’ve fished out the red herring and re-flung your bait into the murky pond, what do you see? What do you feel? Is it about love? Grief? Parenting? Friendship? Even for its leading actor, the film’s meaning is enigmatic, and most certainly evolving. “Finding a restorative tenderness towards a traumatised childhood,” Saura Lightfoot-Leon shrugs with an assuredness that falls short of ubiquity. “It’s finding a way to move forward, it’s finding a way to release everything that might be held.”
Luna Carmoon’s debut feature is a totemic splash of colour on the blank-ish canvas of the Dutch-born, London-based actor’s embryonic career. Lightfoot-Leon’s raw, permissive and unguarded performance as the teenage Maria, whom we meet a third-or-so into the film’s duration as the narrative shifts timeframe and perspective, has earned her comprehensive acclaim, and two nominations at this year’s BIFA Awards for Breakthrough Performance and Best Joint Lead Performance (opposite Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn) respectively. Considering the sparsity of her filmography prior to Hoard—a smattering of shorts, a cameo in Apple TV’s Masters of the Air—it’s a highly commendable feat. “I didn’t really think about it,” the 26-year-old says on her disillusionment with awards-and-the-like. “I knew what we were making was really special, but I was still very fresh at the time to all of this, so I was very naive. I didn’t know what BIFA was, honestly [laughs]. I was just thinking about telling a story, and it meant that I knew that whatever we were making would have some sort of impact. I’m very grateful that the film is getting the recognition it deserves.”
Lightfoot-Leon speaks from a window-side desk, with the twinkling morning light like a mirror to the effervescence that bleeds through her computer screen. Capacious and generous in conversation, the actor shares delicate analogies through an accent without borders, a characteristic carved from the motley nature of a childhood spent jotting around disparate circumferences. “I had a very particular upbringing because my parents were choreographers and dancers,” she offers. “I lived almost like a circus life, traveling the world with them, with a company. The people I grew up around are dancers. And if you go to a studio or you go to a theatre or you meet dancers, you’ll get that it’s a very specific language. It is body language.”
The influence of dance oozes into Lightfoot-Leon’s turn as Maria. Hoard is rooted in the physicality of her performance; a skittish vitality struck by instinctive desperation. There was a “feral quality” that the actor and her director developed, which began from the first time that she and Carmoon met in person. “It was my second audition, and we were having so much fun,” she recalls. “It was improvised and I was doing crazy stuff. I remember being on the floor and them videoing me, and Luna would just throw situations at me and I would react, but it was very childlike and had this element of animalism. It just came naturally to me. I’m someone who always lives very physically anyway so I bring that with me to roles.”
The small troop of people that she was nestled within during an intensive six week filming period brought out the best in Lightfoot-Leon. “There’s this vibrational energy that you create when it’s a really tight ensemble, and there’s trust and playfulness,” she says of a cast that features fellow newcomer Deba Hekmat as Maria’s friend Laraib and Sex Education’s Samantha Spiro as her adoptive carer. The biggest coup for the film though, is the acquisition of Hollywood’s new poster boy, Joseph Quinn, who found time to star opposite Lightfoot-Leon amidst filming for Gladiator II and A Quiet Place: Day One. And it is in the chemistry between the two stars that allows the film the most air to breathe, and room to explore. Almost Heathcliff and Cathy-esque, the brute and somatic intimacy of the two characters is guided and gestated by their shared trauma, and communicated through a lens of a coalescing ambition to liberate their inner child.
“You have to have a willingness, an element of like: ‘Let’s just go for it, fuck it’,” Lightfoot-Leon says on diving headfirst into the complexity of the two characters’ relationship, and her own bond with Quinn. “I think that’s very important in acting in general, you have to throw yourself in. From the first moment I met Joe, it was fun but it was a bit out there. We started off with a chemistry read, you know, niceties, sitting in chairs and reading. And I told him, ‘Please, feel free to fuck with me,’ and he was like ‘Yeah yeah yeah, all right.’ And then what happened is that I started to fuck with him and then he actually genuinely got pissed off [laughs]. You don’t nurture chemistry, you don’t make it in a bottle. The nurturing of it was also just spending time on set. Luna created a wonderful environment for us to spend time with each other a little bit but then it was mixed with work, so it was like getting to know each other personally but also it did feel very professional.”
For her debut leading role, Lightfoot-Leon truly gave her all. She plunged headfirst into Maria throughout the month and a half shoot, staying in character and keeping her imagined counterpart’s South London inflections—even to Carmoon. Method acting was something that she felt compelled to do for this particular role, but in reflection, feels that such a commitment isn’t necessary for each project she becomes attached to. “I was completely immersed,” she remembers. “We filmed an insane amount of footage in six weeks, and I was on it for most of the time. The structure of it made me want to throw myself in. I stayed in the accent the whole time because I was so scared that I was gonna get it wrong. I really wanted to make sure that I was getting everything as right as I could, and I gave a lot. I look back and I’m like ‘Wow, I really went there.’ I didn’t plan it, I just cared so much about the project and meeting Luna and the cast and crew, it felt that everyone was giving a lot, so I felt a need to give everything. Afterwards, I got withdrawal symptoms, suddenly being disconnected from all these people I’d been around for so long. That was my first time really experiencing that, and I don’t think every project has to be like that. Because in the end, you give away a part of yourself and it doesn’t require that. You need stamina as an actor.”
A career on the screen is a marathon not a sprint, and since the flourishing success of Hoard, the rising actor’s opportunities have spread across the embryonic miles of her odyssey. Early in 2025, she’ll be featuring in Netflix action drama American Primeval, but first, she is currently starring in Showtime’s espionage thriller The Agency alongside Michael Fassbender, Richard Gere and Jodie Turner-Smith. ”There were all of these wonderful people who are big dogs and I’m there like ‘woof’,” she giggles on the cast. “But in a beautiful way. I didn’t feel too intimidated, I just felt excited. I love a challenge and I love projects that scare me, that’s why I take jobs.” Her character, Danny, is a young covert trainee, whose arc takes her from a fresh and talented new recruit to depths that she didn’t know she was capable of. “I’ve been very lucky with the jobs I’ve gotten,” Lightfoot-Leon says. “They’ve all been extremely different—different time periods, different accents, different young women who are strong and vulnerable in different ways. It’s wonderful because I get to explore different versions of me, and I think with The Agency, this is the job that has been, ironically, most like me in some ways. Because the job of a covert agent is to find different masks of yourself and present them and get good at it. And that’s my job as an actor; I present different versions of myself under imaginary circumstances.”
Though accolades are far from her incentive, if Saura Lightfoot-Leon does pick up one or both of the BIFA awards on Sunday (8th December) it’ll be a just reward for her towering yet diaphanous interpretation of her on-screen oddball Maria. And with her reputation growing at a quickening pace and her coterie of collaborations ever more eye-raising, she best get used to seeing her name pulled out of an envelope to symphonies of applause. But for Saura, there must be balance; there’s life beyond the lens, after all. “I’m really happy to have time to do my life stuff and that’s something I’m really prioritising at the moment,” she beams before we part ways. “I really value my life and my friendships and my family and my health. And I think a healthy way to be is to sometimes press pause and say, ‘I just want to make spaghetti tonight’.” Bolognese or carbonara?
Photography by Dillon Rana
Words by Ben Tibbits
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