Phoebe Dynevor: ‘One minute you’re washing the dishes, the next you’re at the Met Ball’

The actress’s meteoric rise has taken her from Bridgerton star to Louis Vuitton ambassador – but she claims she doesn’t get recognised often

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As Daphne Bridgerton, Phoebe Dynevor had 104 dresses made especially for her in the first season alone. ‘They would cut them on my body,’ she recalls. You could say she knows how to stand still for a fitting. Even so, the leap from fashion ingénue to Louis Vuitton ambassador requires considerable gymnastics. Literally. ‘You need to learn how to throw some moves,’ she says of the looks she’s just been photographed in for The Telegraph’s shoot.
Of all the luxury fashion houses, Vuitton is the most experimental. ‘It’s true,’ laughs Dynevor (pronounced Dinnervor). ‘They’re not like dainty pieces. You turn up in your knitwear or whatever, and you can feel them going on. We wore half corsets in Bridgerton, so that was some preparation for the structure of some of these clothes.’ She has one of those corsets framed at home.
‘Even so, the first time you try on a Louis Vuitton full look can be quite intimidating. Then you realise they’re like armour. I love the way Nicolas [Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton’s creative director] says he wants to make women feel powerful, because you feel that – and I find it helpful on a red carpet, when you’re being scrutinised 360 degrees. Whenever I wear something he’s designed, I think, OK, I’m getting into some sort of character. His clothes make you feel, “Right, I can do this”.’
We’re sitting in the shade – she’s a natural redhead with exceedingly fair skin, who wore a blonde wig for the shoot – of a former cement factory on the outskirts of Barcelona where, minutes earlier, she was in full Blue Steel mode. It’s the day after Ghesquière’s blockbuster Cruise show which he staged in Antoni Gaudí’s colourful, fantastic Park Güell. Dynevor was there with her mother, the actress Sally Dynevor, who has inhabited the role of Sally Webster (now Metcalfe) in Coronation Street since 1986. ‘She absolutely loved the collection,’ Dynevor says of her mother. ‘I mean, it was her first ever fashion show. What a place to start.’
As fashion gigs go, Vuitton is the big one – some brand ambassadorships are so generously paid, one celebrity stylist told me, that it can set actors up with their first property. Contracts with jewellery and fashion brands also mean actors can afford to take roles in small budget indie movies – such as Emily, the financier Dynevor played in the 2023 Fair Play, a thriller partly about sexism in the workplace. ‘I’m very much drawn to complicated characters,’ says Dynevor, whose fragile prettiness is almost fetishised in Fair Play. ‘I couldn’t play anyone self-righteous. Daphne was surprisingly complex. She’s no prude – and some of her choices are very dubious’.
Unlikely as it sounds (his tastes normally skew towards suspense or sci-fi films including Poltergeist, The Hunger, The Last Days on Mars and Aliens), Ghesquière was a big fan of Bridgerton. Then again, it did represent a complete and alien world. Dynevor was signed up by Vuitton as an ambassador straight after the first season of Bridgerton. ‘I think he watches everything,’ says Dynevor.
Telegraph shoot over, Dynevor’s back in a lightweight cream Paige cardigan, a Dôen top and jeans. It’s not even close to the attitude she projects when she’s wearing Vuitton. For public events, she works with London-based Australian super-stylist Nicky Yates, who also works with Claire Foy, Carey Mulligan and Daisy Edgar-Jones. ‘There’s the real me and the public version,’ says Dynevor. ‘That’s the only way I can deal with the criticism you’re subject to on the red carpet. It doesn’t affect me too much because that version on the red carpet isn’t really me. Like I know who I am and what I would wear to a wedding.’
Her next role sees her mainly wearing… water. ‘It’s a shark movie directed by Tommy Wirkola,’ she tells me. Wirkola is a Norwegian filmmaker best known for horror movies – Ghesquière would approve.
‘I don’t know how much I can say other than I’m about to go off to Melbourne for three months and hopefully the sharks will be CGI.’ She’s nervous about spending so much time submerged, but also very excited to be in Australia working with Wirkola. A few weeks later she’s posting pictures of herself with some local kangaroos. It has since been confirmed that the film will be called Beneath the Storm and will be released next August.
As for how her English-rose skin will stand up to the searing heat of Oz, she’s sanguine: ‘I’m a skincare freak,’ she explains. ‘I like to travel with a crazy amount of products. At the moment it’s all these random Korean products I see on TikTok. My skin’s very dry so it just drinks up moisture.’ Daphne’s deceptively simple hair in Bridgerton was a wig. Nonetheless, she had to be in hair and make-up every day at 4am (‘Most of that time was spent on hair’) and had a mattress in her trailer for napping purposes.
Now 29, she currently splits her time between Los Angeles – with her fiancé, the actor/producer Cameron Fuller – and north London, where she shares a flat with a friend from school she’s known since they were both 11. Hampstead Heath, she says, is her happy place.
The vibe at home is colourful and cosy. There’s a lot of pink in the flat and the kitchen, which she doesn’t often cook in, is olive green.
Given how much time she spends in airport lounges, Dynevor ought to be the consummate packer. ‘I’m hopeless. I can’t do hand luggage only at all. I just chuck everything in and then some extra. I am good at sleeping on planes though – and reading.’ She has just finished Bunny by Mona Awad, a dark tale of loneliness, and a Dolly Alderton. She’d like to try her hand at producing movies herself – not the money end, but the part where you bring stories to the screen. ‘But it’s hard. I’ve had two projects fall through recently.’
Luckily, given her transcontinental commute, she finds flying relaxing, ‘although if I watch a sad film I cry a lot – what’s that about?’ I tell her I’ve read it’s to do with the altitude. The air pressure affects our brains and makes it harder to regulate our emotions. ‘Could be. I’ve got a bit savvier about what to consume on board. I try not to eat on the plane since a friend told me they put extra salt in everything because your taste buds change when you’re flying high. That’s hard, because I love eating. And I try to drink three litres of water with electrolytes. It does mean you’re constantly going to the loo.’ All this is recounted in a Mancunian lilt – light but distinctively different from Daphne’s cut-glass RP and Emily’s brittle New York, yet Dynevor insists she’s not a natural mimic. Although she knew she wanted to act early on, she didn’t go to drama school.
‘That’s probably why I’m so nervous about taking any theatre roles.You need to know how to throw your voice and I don’t have those techniques.’ Nor is she one of those actors who can just roll into a dialect. ‘It takes me a lot of practice. I’m definitely not a Method actor, but for Emily in Fair Play, I kept the accent for the whole six weeks’ shoot. I’d be on the phone to my mum at night and she’d say, “What are you doing?”’
Dynevor comes from three generations of actors. Her father, Tim Dynevor, is now a script writer. Both her paternal grandparents were TV actors too, and at 14 she began her career in Waterloo Road, a BBC One soap set in a large comprehensive school. Regé-Jean Page, her co-star in Bridgerton, was another alumnus, although the two never overlapped.
For a while, Dynevor worked consistently, juggling roles with GCSEs and A-Levels. At 18 she moved to London – which is when the offers dried up, probably because she was transitioning from child actor to grown-up. ‘That was agony,’ she says. ‘I hate not working.’
No one could say she wasn’t warned, coming from an acting dynasty, although her mother’s 30-years-and-counting career in the world’s longest-running soap may have given her a false sense of security.
She held down a job in a cocktail bar, then moved to LA where she spent another nine months ‘resting’, although it was anything but restful. ‘Maybe that’s why I love La La Land so much,’ she says. ‘My life was literally like Emma Stone’s at the start of that film. Audition after audition, rejection after rejection.’ Eventually she got the call from Shonda Rhimes, the groundbreaking American writer and producer of Bridgerton, followed by six months shooting in the UK.
‘It’s a crazy industry which can turn on a dime,’ she reflects. ‘One minute, you’re back at home because it’s Covid,’ [Bridgerton wasn’t unleashed until Christmas 2020] ‘and you’re washing the dishes and arguing with your little brother [Samuel, who hasn’t followed the family calling, although her sister Harriet has], the next you’re at the Met Ball.’ The Met Gala was the acme of weirdness. ‘I mean, I don’t know about everyone there, but I was doing a lot of people-watching. So you’re being looked at, and you’re also busy looking at everyone there. And it’s all over in a flash.’
The first time (she’s been twice, natch), she went with Louis Vuitton. ‘They take care of it all and you don’t really have to think too much about what you’re wearing.’ But this year she was invited by Charlotte Tilbury and wore an ethereal frothy pale-pink Victoria Beckham dress. ‘That was a lot more hands-on. I sent Victoria’s team some references. We only had 10 days and they worked wonders.’
She still travels by Tube and takes Ubers at night. She says she doesn’t get recognised very often, or if she does, no one really bothers her – despite being in one of the biggest Netflix hits of all time. Belatedly, or perhaps it’s a sign of how meteoric her rise has been lately, she was nominated for Bafta’s Rising Star Award at the start of 2024. It’s enough to give anyone mental whiplash. ‘It’s been a strange four years,’ she laughs again. She seems someone who’s happy to go with the flow. She and Fuller haven’t yet worked out whether they’ll live in London or LA or continue to their bi-continental romance – and it doesn’t bother her. ‘Straight after Bridgerton there was more lockdown Covid, then the writers’ strike [which shut down all filming in Hollywood for months]. I think I’m still mapping it all out in my brain – but what I do know is that 90 per cent of this business is rejection. Enjoy the good times while you can.’
Jewellery and fashion throughout, Louis Vuitton. Hair by Dayaruci at The Wall Group. Make-up by Gina Kane at Caren. Styling by Tona Stell. With thanks to Cementiri d’Igualada, Barcelona, Spain
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