Kaya Scodelario

Kaya Scodelario was a teenager when she was cast as Effy Stonem in Skins, and for the first series the part was almost wordless: a younger sister who watched, smirked and left the room. When the show finally handed her a lead she turned out to be the most interesting thing in it, and Effy is still the character the series is remembered for.

The decade that followed took a familiar shape for young British actors. There was one genuinely serious film early, Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights, where she plays the older Cathy in a muddy, near-silent adaptation that asks for physical presence rather than dialogue. Then came the franchise years: three Maze Runner films as Teresa, a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, a Resident Evil reboot, roles built out of function rather than character.

The interesting turn is recent. Crawl is a lean survival picture in which she does almost all of the work herself, wet, injured and mostly alone with a hurricane and something in the water, and it proved she could carry a film physically. Susie Glass in The Gentlemen is better still: a criminal executive who is calmer and smarter than every man in the room, played with dry impatience and no vanity at all. Senna followed. After fifteen years of being cast as somebody's girlfriend or somebody's assigned love interest, she is finally getting parts written for an adult.