The lead actor in the best British film of the year clearly remembers her first teenage, all-girls’ holiday. As well she should: it was barely a decade ago. After a childhood full of acting jobs (from EastEnders to Tracy Beaker Returns via Holby City) that annually swallowed up her breaks from school, then-17-year-old Mia McKenna-Bruce was intent on finally having a proper Med-for-it break.
“Me and my friends thought we were being bougie by going to Ibiza. But we didn't go to any of the superclubs – we went to the Ibiza strip. It could have been anywhere in the world.” she adds, laughing. Those alcoholiday memories – of pool parties, happy hours, packed clubs, fishbowl-cocktails by the dozen – came in useful between last August and November. The young cast of How To Have Sex, a powerful coming-of-age, loss-of-innocence future-classic, were parked in Malia, "living on the actual Malia strip while we shot. So it was literally like I went back to being 17 again." The Greek resort was the setting for the debut feature from 30-year-old writer-director Molly Manning-Walker – a prize-winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
“When we got there, it was just coming out of the height of the season,” explains McKenna-Bruce, who was raised in Bromley in suburban southeast London by parents who run an air-conditioning business and today is zooming in from her home in rural Kent. She’s just had a baby, eight-week-old Leo, with her actor partner Tom Leach, whom she met during the making of The Rebels, a 2019 film about rebellious teenagers in Roman-occupied 1st century Wales.
It’s hard to square this 26-year-old new mum with the actor who persuasively ages down 10 years. But it makes all the more remarkable her achievement in playing wide-eyed schoolgirl Tara, fresh from her GCSEs, who’s on holiday with a pair of more sexually experienced friends. Her performance is so powerful that, uniquely, McKenna-Bruce is double-nominated at next month's British Independent Film Awards, in the Best Lead and Best Breakthrough Performance categories (the film has a whopping 13 nominations in total).
“Filming on the strip at night,” she continues. “You'd always get people walking through scenes, being like, 'what's going on?' and trying to get in shot. There was a lot of chaos going on all the time, especially when were out doing the party scenes, so it just added to the atmosphere.”How To Have Sex begins in those bright lights of the strip but soon shades into a hungover darkness. After the Londoners meet a group of northerners, the new-best-mates party vibes soon become twisted. Drunk couples pair-off creating complicated dynamics and exploring the murkier hinterlands between consent and coercion.
McKenna-Bruce's journey with How To Have Sex began almost two years ago, in December 2021, when she first auditioned. She knew from early on that Manning Walker’s script was “a personal story of hers. So, filming it, knowing we're telling Molly's story, as well as so many other people's stories, the feeling was: we want to get this right.”
The writer-director fed her own experiences into her screenplay. The scene in which a blind-drunk Badger, one of the northern lads, receives oral sex in front of a baying, tanked-up audience is something the filmmaker witnessed, from atop a pool table, in Magaluf. Manning-Walker has also spoken of her experience of sexual assault, in London, after her drink was spiked on a night out when she was 16.
Those personal details, says McKenna-Bruce, “were always very much an open conversation. In the rehearsal period, we weren't just working on the scenes of the script. We were working on going deep in these characters’ backstories, and on why Molly was making this film.”
As part of the pre-production process, the filmmakers held focus groups with young people. The director relayed to her twentysomething cast how “girls were standing up and saying, 'girls need to wear more clothes or not drink as much.’” So, McKenna Bruce, says, “Molly was like: 'This is so important to make this film.' Because somewhere along the way, the lines have been blurred. Sex is between two humans and where have we lost that humanity?”
Why does McKenna-Bruce, who has two younger sisters, think that blurring has occurred? Is one factor perhaps the ready online access to porn for boys? “I think so,” she replies. “As well, there's so much shame surrounding sex and the conversations about sex. Particularly at that age, it's taboo to talk about. You have sexual education, but it's very much the biological side of it. No feelings are involved. I don’t remember any lesson on consent growing up. So it's for you to figure out yourself.
“And to find these answers, most people would turn to porn or something like that,” she adds. “Because how else are you supposed to do it? So, yeah, there's this lack of conversation, and therefore this lack of education on consent and on safe sex.”
There's so much shame surrounding sex and the conversations about sex. Particularly at that age, it's taboo to talk about. To find these answers, most people would turn to porn
When I ask if McKenna-Bruce had any dodgy experiences as a younger woman, she – not unreasonably – demurs. “Ah.... It's not something I really want to talk about!” What she will say is that she wishes a film like How To Have Sex had existed in her own teenage years.
“It does just open that conversation. It gives you a safe space to talk about it. I've got a 16-year-old sister, and that was one of the reasons [I wanted to do it] . As soon as I read the script, I was like: I would love my sister to see this. So I know that it's important.”
How To Have Sex is, too, meaningful for McKenna-Bruce’s career. Her portrayal of a mid-teenage girl going from innocence to despair burns up the screen. She’s surely a front-runner for a BAFTA Rising Star nomination – even if she has been acting since she was eight, when she began a two-year run on the London stage in Billy Elliot.
“I started with a local dance school around the corner when I was two years old, because I just had so much energy,” she recalls, smiling at the memories. Performing “was something I was dedicated to from a really young age. I became obsessed with Shirley Temple!” McKenna-Bruce laughs. She keep a notebook about the Hollywood child star, filled with notes culled from a documentary about Temple. Her devotion was so complete that “I thought I had to be American to be an actor, so I put on an American accent all the time.”
Still, even with those lifelong dreams, McKenna-Bruce couldn't have imagined that she would have ended up at Cannes, only in her mid-20s, with a film in which she’s the lead. “That was like being in a film itself,” she marvels of her experience on the Croisette in May. “It was like an out-of-body experience. It was only when I got home that I could decompress and be like: what on earth just happened?”
What just happened was an extended standing ovation for How To Have Sex and, then, the winning of the festival's Un Certain Regard award. “I started crying during the standing ovation. And I am not a crier as a person,” she insists. “I was like: it's because I'm pregnant! But I just couldn't stop. My whole body still gets goosebumps when I think about it.”
Right now, McKenna-Bruce is, understandably, considering her next moves – a professional pause necessitated by both the actors' strike in America and new motherhood. So far, she says, juggling work and family has been "actually incredible. I've got amazing support around us. That's the biggest thing that I could say that to anyone expecting: have a good support network. It's made everything as easy-breezy as it can be with a tiny newborn baby. And also, he's somehow really well-behaved." Has li'l Leo taken that from her? "Yeah, definitely," she replies with a larky eye-roll. "No, we'd be well in trouble if he'd taken after me!"
