Alisha Boe on The Bucaneers, Nostalgia and Black Opium

It’s sweltering in London when Alisha Boe and I meet but the Shoreditch hotel room we take refuge in has air conditioning. Having moved to Los Angeles from Norway when she was seven, Boe is better equipped for the heat than I am. In fact, it comes as a welcome break for her, having spent the last few months trying to acclimatise to Scotland’s cooler conditions while filming the third season of The Buccaneers in Glasgow for Apple TV+. “It’s cosy up there … but I need the sun. I want to feel uncomfortable. I want to feel sticky,” she says. 

Based on Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel of the same name and set in the 1870s, The Buccaneers is a Gilded Age story of female friendship and Anglo-American culture clash – debauched and dramatic. Boe plays Conchita Closson, a free-spirited New Yorker who moves to London to marry a British aristocrat, Lord Richard Dick Marable (played by Josh Dylan), her five friends following close in tow. Closson struggles to adapt to the rigid traditions of aristocratic Britain, and new dynamics and relationships bring with them explosive social, marital and financial fractures among Closson and her friends.

“It’s not your traditional period drama – it’s funny, it’s romantic and it’s wildly different from anything I’ve done before,” says Boe, whose cinematic career so far spans genres from Paranormal Activity 4 to Karen Maine’s coming-of-ager Yes, God, Yes to Jesse Eisenberg’s feature directorial debut When You Finish Saving the World, though Boe is perhaps best known for playing Jessica Davis in the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why. “I’d never done a period drama before,” she says, “it’s something that I had always wanted to do but I never thought there was space for a mixed girl to be in a period drama to this capacity. Bringing diversity to these stories is important.” 

Born in Oslo, Boe began acting when she was just five years old at an after-school drama club. “I’d be playing Tree One in the school production,” she says with a laugh. After moving to the US when her mother remarried, she attended El Camino Real High School in Los Angeles, where she became increasingly involved in its drama programme. “Dancing, performing, acting was always the way I expressed myself.”

“I lived in Canoga Park. It was a cool place to grow up,” she says. “In summer, you’d pay $1 to take the bus to Zuma Beach. It would pick you up outside Calabasas High School, which is like the fancy high school in the rich part of town. Summers were the best. We’d hike the Santa Monica Mountains, we’d swim in friends’ pools, skateboard, enjoy the heat. It felt like the movie Fast Times.” Acting seems like the natural progression for a Calabasas girl: “The culture there, the industry, it’s ever-present,” she says. “And when you’re interested in acting as I was, it was nothing but acting classes. Being LA, they’d have these showcases where agents and managers would come along to watch.” Which is how Boe was first scouted for commercials – an ad for Sears department store here, Bratz dolls there. 

Today‘s commercial projects look a little different: Boe is the face of YSL’s famously nostalgic “party girl” fragrance Black Opium. A new iteration, Pink Glaze, offers a fruity take on the dense, sweet and peppery classic. “It’s bold, it’s magnetic, it just has this playfulness,” Boe says. My first job was on the fragrance counter in Debenhams aged 16, I tell Boe, and I distinctly remember the first time I experienced Black Opium. She remembers the first time she did too. “I was in high school and this very cool girl a few years above me was wearing it. I remember walking past her in the hallway and just being floored by this incredible scent. I had to ask her what it was and it was Black Opium. I was always very brave.” 

Which checks out: the audacious young actor was only 11 when she landed her first film role, in  the horror Amusement. “I didn’t want to do it through high school, I wanted to study, but then things started picking up so I started taking it seriously.” At 17, she dropped out of school and moved out of home to hustle away on different acting and advertising gigs. Shortly after, at 19, she was cast in 13 Reasons Why. “I’ve been fortunate enough to make it work ever since,” she says. The dream of becoming a professional actor far predates the move to LA. “When I was in Norway, this girl that I was in this after-school drama programme with and her mom ran into the room – I was so young, it’s crazy to remember this – but she’d booked a part for a show on one of our local channels. I remember the excitement on her face. I think that was the first moment I realised this – playing Tree One, acting – could be a living.” 

Now 29 years old, Boe’s ambition endures. She likes the romance genre, but fancies action too. “I want to train and do stunts. I want to do an action film, like Angelina Jolie in Wanted. I want to curve the bullet.” And there are directors she’d like to work with too. Hiro Murai, Jordan Peele, Andrea Arnold, to name a few. “Acting is such a beautiful art form that I respect and constantly learn from. I love the stories I get to tell, the people I get to meet – castmates, crewmembers, directors,” she says. “I wouldn’t know what to do if I wasn’t acting.”