Jessica Henwick manifests her dream life

Does Jessica Henwick believe in the power of manifestation? Well, sort of. When the actor was 15 she wrote a fan letter to the film director Rian Johnson, whom she went on to work with on Netflix’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery more than a decade later. “In my audition I told him, ‘I have a bone to pick with you – you never replied to my letter!’” Henwick remembers now. When she eventually got the role of Peg – the nerdy personal assistant doing damage control for Kate Hudson’s immensely problematic Birdie Jay – Johnson sent Henwick a letter of his own. “He wrote to me as if he were replying to my letter from those years ago,” the actor recalls. “It was one of those moments where you’re, like, damn, the power of, err, what’s it called? Manifestation? Manifestation, man. I wrote him a fan letter and now I’m working with him! What a wild ending to that story. I should really print out his letter and frame it.”

But Henwick is apprehensive to link her blockbuster roles in all the big franchises – Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Blade Runner and The Matrix – to any higher power. “Anyone reading this is gonna be like, ‘What an idiot!’ [But] I used to read tarot cards when I was a teenager and anything that I read came true… And it freaked me out… so I stopped!” Spooky, I say. “Right!” So she swore off practising sort of fortune-telling again. “I think there is a lot to be said for the power of the mind,” she reflects. “And creating things based on willpower, which is what I think manifestation really comes down to. But sometimes it’s too powerful and it creeps me out!”

Henwick joins our Zoom as she’s decimating the interior of her flat in London ahead of a renovation. “I’m just destroying everything and ripping it all up,” she tells me, panning her phone camera round a derelict room that has been stripped back to its bare bones. She’s sitting cross-legged in the middle of the empty room, her hair scraped back into a messy bun, her burgundy jumper covered in white dust. Midway through our conversation, the air purifier regulating the dust levels in the room turns off and Henwick starts coughing quite aggressively. “This place is so dusty!” she says between breaths. Still, despite the significant challenges posed to her breathing, Henwick manages to speak warmly; she’s animated, self-effacing and full of starry anecdotes. 

And those stories come with the trade: the 31-year-old has been working as an actor since 2009, when she was cast in the lead role of Bo in the CBBC series Spirit Warriors, which made her the first actress of East Asian descent to play the lead role in a British television series. Since her journey away from British telly and towards Hollywood began, Henwick’s star power has traversed every big-name franchise you could think of, and scored her a leading role as the martial artist Colleen Wing in the Marvel series Iron Fist (2017) and a part acting with Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans in Netflix’s The Gray Man (2022). We’re speaking today because Henwick is now starring with Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer in Cuckoo, a horror-thriller by the German director Tilman Singer (Luz), which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. 

The opportunity to work with Singer, and seeing Schafer’s name on the call sheet, is what drew Henwick to sign onto the film last-minute and travel to Germany. “I’m a huge fan of Tilman and also Hunter, obviously, like everyone on the planet. I adore her performance in Euphoria and I think she’s so fucking talented,” Henwick says. 

For the role she had to learn American Sign Language (ASL), to communicate with her on-screen daughter experiencing a non-verbal phase. “I had always been interested in ASL, and had started learning it away from the film, but one of the most fulfilling things about Cuckoo was learning from a member of the deaf community who worked with us as both a tutor and a translator – he’s German, so he uses German Sign Language, but I speak American Sign Language. So it was really fascinating getting to hang out with him and talk to him. And yeah, we tried to be as respectful to that culture. It’s a really beautiful culture.” 

Working on Cuckoo is the first time Henwick has touched the horror genre. Sure, she’s done fantasy, sci-fi, dramas and thrillers – but why no horror up until now? “I’m such a wimp!” Her voice erupts into a room-filling, dirty roar. “It takes a lot to get me to watch a horror film.” That might be explained by the “scarring” she carries from watching scary films with her older brother, Joshua, when they were growing up in Surrey. “I watched Halloween H2O when I was about ten and it absolutely terrified me!” she says with a laugh. “It gave me a lifelong fear of ice skates because a guy gets [a skating blade] down the centre of his face… To this day I’m very careful with ice skates!” 

While Cuckoo is more of a horror-cum-thriller, Henwick says that if she did sign onto a full-blown scream-a-thon – ghosts, jumpscares, haunted houses and all – she would fully embrace it. “I would want to be the killer!” she says, perching herself on a bare window ledge in her flat. “I think you want to be the villain rather than the protagonist, especially in horror films. It is so often just the ingenue woman and you end up crying and screaming for 30 days of the 31-day shoot. I think it’s more fun [to be the villain] and you can save your vocal cords!”

Henwick was born to a Singaporean Chinese mother and English father. She spent most of her childhood living in the countryside, exploring local woods with her two brothers – one older, one younger – and getting chased off farmers’ land. Acting has always been a part of her life, she says, and she never entertained the idea of another career path. “I never had a eureka moment – acting has always just been there. And I think about this a lot… I look back at my teen years, and I was so single-minded and focused on [acting], thinking I’m gonna get to do this one day. You sacrifice things to pursue this career, you sacrifice personal moments like going to birthdays, weddings and funerals because you’re in another country, you’re 16 hours away, you have to get to this rehearsal or whatever it is. And so on the one hand, I look back and I sometimes think, ‘Oh, I missed out on a few things.’” On the other hand, Henwick says, she was lucky to establish her career so young, and having that direction and dedication might have been what she needed. “I think I would have floundered and I would have kind of lost myself if I didn’t have a goal when I was younger because of my personality at the time… ” she trails off. “I do much better now.”

Now, about those franchises. Henwick had a handful of lines as the X-wing pilot Jessika “Testor” Pava in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), but the reaction from the fandom was completely unforeseen and made her see the power of long-running legacy franchises first-hand. “I was definitely shocked by Star Wars. Because that character – and I’m on screen for barely any of that film – blew up. People fell in love with it. It helped a lot [that Jessika] is one of the leads in a spin-off book. And there’s a bunch of comics, and you could see that it’s me. This whole fandom formed around her and people really fell in love with it.”

As I rewatch the footage sent to me by Henwick’s publicist – scenes from Star Wars, GoT, Iron Fist and Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel – the clip that moves me most is from Henwick’s self-directed short film Bus Girl, which was nominated for the best British short film award at 2023’s Baftas. Bus Girl follows June (played by Henwick), who is working as a server in a Michelin-starred restaurant where she is secretly trying to get noticed as a chef, while navigating a fraught relationship with her mother who is sceptical of her burgeoning career. The film, which is shot entirely on Xiaomi camera phones – the company funded the short – is beguiling, heartbreaking and entirely geared towards the senses, being set in a restaurant’s kitchen. And there’s a culinary theme here: a sequel called Sandwich Man, which stars the Harry Potter actor Evanna Lynch and GoT’s Daniel Portman (both of whom also starred in Bus Girl), will be released soon.

Bus Girl’s reception cemented Henwick’s place as a director, since she has spent the best part of her acting career taking notes on the director’s craft from the sidelines (she shadowed Johnson on the Glass Onion set, for example). But the acclaim Bus Girl received continues to astonish Henwick, like the time the Hot Fuzz filmmaker Edgar Wright approached her at a dinner to praise her work. “He came up to me and said, ‘I voted for your short film to win the Bafta.’ I was like, ‘How the fuck? You’re Edgar Wright – how do you know who I am? Why are you watching my short film?!’” 

Henwick is paying it all forward now. In 2021, she launched East by Southeast, a network of East and Southeast Asian creatives in British theatre, television and film that she runs with the Boiling Point actor Lourdes Faberes, whom she calls a close friend. “It came about because we just wanted to celebrate and uplift our community,” she says. “There are so many amazing actors and directors and writers coming up every year and graduating every year. And we just wanted to give them a platform and welcome them into the community. We help sometimes with casting calls – casting directors reach out to us and so do publicists for theatre shows and it’s become this really beautiful thing.” 

Henwick says she’s often in touch with newly graduated actors breaking into the industry who are from British East and Southeast Asian backgrounds. “I’ve had graduate actors come up to me and say what a moment of affirmation it has been [to see the work of East by Southeast]. It’s just a tiny thing that takes a little bit of time out of our day but maybe means something more to someone else… or we’ll get a couple more bums in seats at theatres.”

Suddenly our Zoom cuts out. Henwick sends me an email with the subject line “Hahahaha”. Somehow I can still hear her roaring laughter, even through email. “Thanks for a lovely chat,” she says. “Sent from my Zombie bunker.”