As Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials streams on Netflix, Mia McKenna-Bruce speaks about the reality of being an actress and how she juggles filming with motherhood
It’s only 9am, but Mia McKenna-Bruce has already done the school run and commuted into town from Kent to meet me on this cold, sunny morning. At the 2024 Baftas, the actress won the Rising Star Award for her role as Tara in Molly Manning Walker’s directorial debut, How To Have Sex, the breakout hit film navigating themes of consent, peer pressure and sexual assault, as three teenagers take a rite-of-passage trip to Crete to drink, club and hook up. “The story was such an important one to tell,” says McKenna-Bruce. “So many people connected with it in some capacity.”
2026 is set to be a big year for McKenna-Bruce, with leading roles in major television shows and highly anticipated films (including a significant role in Sam Mendes’ upcoming Beatles biopic). This year, the 28-year-old actress also appears in the leading role of Lady Eileen Brent, the unlikely detective in Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, directed by Chris Sweeney and out on Netflix today. The three-part mystery, also featuring Helena Bonham-Carter and Martin Freeman, follows the investigation of a mysterious murder at a lavish party at a country house in 1925 England. “The script was quite expositional, and used a lot of very specific 1920s language, so hammering the lines was a big part of it,” says McKenna-Bruce.
Seven Dials is by no means McKenna-Bruce’s first period piece. She appeared as Mary Elliott in Carrie Cracknell’s adaptation of the Jane Austen novel Persuasion alongside Dakota Johnson and Richard E Grant. And, out later this year, McKenna-Bruce stars in Lee Haven Jones’ The Lady, a four-part historical crime drama based on true events. She’s playing Jane Andrews – the empathetic but possibly murderous royal dresser to the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson (Natalie Dormer).
This year also sees the release of Claire Denis’ tense and atmospheric new film, The Fence, based on Bernard-Marie Koltès’s play Black Battles with Dog and produced by Saint Laurent, with costume design by Anthony Vaccarello. McKenna-Bruce plays Leonie, loving wife to Horn (Matt Dillon), the American foreman of a remote construction site in Senegal. Landing in West Africa to join her husband, Leonie encounters a tense and unsustainable dynamic between Horn, his colleague (Tom Blyth) and a local (Isaach de Bankolé) searching for justice.
When McKenna-Bruce travelled to Senegal for three months to film, her husband and young son went with her. “Leaving my son wasn’t an option. It wasn’t easy to orchestrate, but it turned out to be the absolute best thing for him,” she says. “Mum guilt is a real thing. The world isn’t cut out for working mums. We say we’d give anything up for our kids, but here I am going off to work. I do think it’s important to teach him that his mum can be a working mum, that she can chase her dreams.”
McKenna-Bruce began acting as a child, landing a major role on Tracy Beaker Returns at just ten years old. At 18, she quit the industry. “I’d been working for ten years, mostly as a child actress,“ she says. “As an adult, I didn’t know how to talk about script or character because I’d been playing the same character since I was ten. This character was a part of me. Auditioning as an adult, I was up against people who had been at drama school – I’d barely been to normal school.”
After taking time out to travel, she reembarked on her acting career, landing a part in a play with the youth-driven production company, Fully Focused UK. “I was working with people who had so much love for being on set and it really ignited me, so I got an agent and started jobbing from there,” she says. “To make it happen, I had to work side jobs … office stuff, pub jobs, cleaning stuff, babysitting. A lot of people have to give up their dreams to pay the bills,” she says. “But they lit a fire in me. I was sitting at my desk in this office and I was like, ‘I’ve got to make this work.’”
“I’d been a jobbing actress for quite a long time but each time I got a part I’d think, this could be the last. There’s always that feeling, but it’s less so now. For the first time, I feel like I can say ‘I’m an actress’,” she says. From the sleuthy Lady Eileen in Seven Dials to the murderous royal dresser in The Lady, and the naive lover in The Fence, McKenna-Bruce is a chameleon. “I almost black out when I‘m acting, then I’ll be like ‘Did I forget a line?’ ‘Did I remember to do this?’ I’ve been lucky that each part has been something really different,” she says, “and this past year, I‘ve been able to just go with each one and transform into these totally different people for each job. It’s been a form of therapy in many ways.”
What’s next for the actress? I probe about her part in the upcoming Sam Mendes’ Beatles biopic as Ringo Starr’s first wife, Maureen Starkey, but she can’t reveal much. “She feels close to me in a lot of ways, and I need to speak up for her. I’m really getting to pour a lot into her,” she says. “I will say … Sam Mendes has a real love for the Beatles and the scripts are stunning. Barry [Keoghan, who plays Ringo] is a godsend. The schedule is intense. It’s a lot of fun.” Favourite Beatles song? “Here Comes the Sun – duh.”
Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials is streaming on Netflix now.
