“We’re Yearning for These Real-Life, Slow-Burn Interactions”: Sadie Soverall on This Summer’s Breakout Love Story

Sadie Soverall is a daydreamer. The sort of summers she yearns for were spent at her grandma’s bungalow in Guernsey, where she’d head out into the garden and lie on the warm floor of a dilapidated greenhouse, making up stories amongst the tomato plants. “It felt like a magical place, my own little world. I talked to myself a lot as a child,” she says, smiling at the thought of her 10-year-old self.

She’s speaking to me from her bedroom in London on a sweltering day, and when we both appear on screen in matching tank tops, we giggle conspiratorially. Soverall still spends a lot of time cocooned in her imagination, she tells me. “Talking to myself is how I get into my characters; testing out how they sound and finding their voices. I even have a little altar to one of the characters I’m prepping for in the corner of my room.” She can’t say what the role is just yet, but if her current trajectory is anything to go by, it’s going to be major.

At 24, Wandsworth-born Soverall is booked and very busy, not long off a sold-out run of John Proctor is the Villain at the Royal Court Theatre, and now starring in Every Year After, the YA romance that’s captured our love of yearning so deeply that Prime Video has already announced a second season. Soverall was still in school when she landed her first major role in Netflix show Fate: The Winx Saga, and she soon caught the eye of director Emerald Fennell, who cast her in Saltburn as Jacob Elordi’s university love interest. She held her own amongst titans including Barry Keoghan, Carey Mulligan and Rosamund Pike, her character Annabel all pouting privilege and noughties waist belts.

“I was really lucky on that set because they had us in the background in a lot of shots, so I got to spend time just watching Barry and Jacob work. They are both incredible at what they do, and I became absolutely obsessed with Alison Oliver [who plays Venetia Catton, sister to Elordi’s Felix]. I think she’s one of the best actors of our time,” says Soverall. The masterclass continued behind the camera, too. “It was fascinating to see how creative Emerald’s process is. She’d come up with little ideas in the moment, or she’d write a new scene at night, and we’d shoot it the next day. It was just so exciting to have a brilliant, intelligent woman at the helm of this thing.”

Soverall, who gently rebuffs any hint of praise with a warm humility, admits Saltburn felt like a turning point. Her childhood dream of becoming an actor—sparked by a love of the 1976 musical Bugsy Malone and fed by a primary school teacher called Mr Vince, who’d write mini plays for her to star in—was no longer just in her head. But she says that nothing has made her success feel more real than playing Percy in Every Year After; the sun-soaked, swoon-worthy adaptation of Carley Fortune’s best-selling book. In it, two childhood best friends who spent summers together in the lakeside town of Barry’s Bay are torn apart by betrayal, then thrown together again in their twenties. The tension is painful and totally delicious.

It’s the latest in a string of book-to-screen blockbusters that have sent our desire for tales of yearning off the charts, from The Summer I Turned Pretty and My Life with the Walter Boys to Heated Rivalry and Off Campus. With an already dedicated (and vocal) fandom attached, does a role like this come with extra pressure? “I think it’s lovely that these books and shows have such devoted fans, but I feel the same amount of pressure as [with]any other character I play,” says Soverall. “Of course, it’s an adaptation, but to my mind, the book is there and perfect, and this is just an expansion of that world. The thing about written stories is that they’re personal—we all have a specific, special version of it in our heads that can never be replaced.”

Like me, she’s a lovergirl, so she understands innately why tales of young love resonate with people of all ages and are coming to define this current era of entertainment. “Partly, the escapism and levity they offer are exactly what we need in the world right now. But I think there’s also something about social media impacting the way many of us relate to each other, and the instant nature of it. We’re yearning for these real-life, slow-burn interactions,” she muses. “When I was younger it was cool to be nonchalant, which was really hard for me because I wear my heart on my sleeve. But I think it’s swinging the other way, and that’s really lovely. Being able to talk about how you feel is a joyous part of being human.”

Soverall says she drew a lot of inspiration from Meg Ryan’s roster when preparing for Percy. “I watched a lot of Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and especially When Harry Met Sally, because it captures that specific feeling of seeing someone significant after a long time apart,” she says. “Meg Ryan is my favourite rom com queen; she’s fun and a bit messy, and her characters make mistakes. She’s so exciting to watch because she’s not perfect, and because of that, she kind of is perfect.”

This leads us onto her own relationship with imperfection and the journey she’s been on to embrace parts of herself that she once wished away. “As a mixed-race person who’s Trinidadian, Scottish, Irish and English, I always felt a bit different as a teenager. The only thing that was cool and attractive at my school was having straight, blonde hair and blue eyes, and when I was going through puberty, my hair would just be huge and frizzy no matter what I did,” she shares.

When the boy she liked said that her hair made her look “like a witch”, she saved up her pocket money to get a straightening treatment. “I immediately regretted it. I looked in the mirror and realised I’d done this permanent thing based on a very small group of people’s opinions about me,” she says. “There was a period when I was trying to be someone else, but I can look back and have compassion for that version of myself. Now I love my hair, and I love all the features I got from my Trinidad side; they’re beautiful and special. And I think it’s really cool that I have my big hair on this cover. It’s like, in their face, you know?”

I do know; the tussle with our hair almost feels like a rite of passage for mixed women, but it’s glorious to see Soverall own exactly who she is, especially when, despite her impressive score sheet so far, she’s really just getting started in her career.

Is she planning to take her foot off the gas anytime soon, or is it still full steam ahead? She sips her iced coffee, thoughtful for a moment. “I’ve been wanting to work all the time, but the summer sort of forces you to slow down. It’s a time for being with friends in the sun and having fun and looking after yourself. So I’ll do some of that, then I’ll get back to it.” She smiles slyly, as if she doesn’t even believe this herself.

Her eyes flick in the direction of the altar she’s made to her next character, and I suspect she’s ready to head back to her happy place: her own imagination. I wish her sweet daydreams and sign off, safe in the knowledge I’ll meet her again on screen many more times in the future.