How ‘Senna’ Helped Kaya Scodelario Connect With Her Brazilian Heritage: “This Fed My Soul More Than Anything I’ve Ever Done”

Senna came at the perfect time for Kaya Scodelario.

She had been in search of the right project, a production shot in Brazil and crafted by its people — something that would tug at the strings of her half-Brazilian heart and challenge her. “It was like Christmas morning,” the star says of finding there was a role going in Netflix series Senna. Her mother moved to England from Brazil shortly before Scodelario was born, but the Skins and The Gentlemen star often spent summers there growing up and has always felt deeply attached to that side of her identity.

“Senna was a huge part of my childhood,” she says of the former racing driver. “To every Brazilian, he is a hero and an icon, and culturally so significant.” She’s right: Ayrton Senna da Silva was the face of Formula One for a long time and his legacy has endured through decades. The three-time World Champion is something akin to a saint in his home country of Brazil, and he is regularly celebrated at the sport’s races today by the teams, drivers and fans. Icon is almost an understatement.

Senna, a six-part series dropping on Friday, Nov. 29, on the streaming platform, follows the life and career of the great racer — and his increasingly fierce rivalry with French teammate Alain Prost — leading up to Senna’s tragic death at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix when a crash on track cost him his life at age 34. He had been championing stricter safety regulations for years before this and, for many, has stayed a martyr of the sport.

Scodelario plays Laura, a fictional character who is often the athlete’s only connection to home as he leaves Brazil for Europe to become an F1 champion. She is a journalist for motorsport magazine Autosport and can converse with him in his native Portuguese, following his career from its early stages until he was one the most successful drivers anyone had ever seen.

The show was shot in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay with an entirely Brazilian crew and Gabriel Leone in the titular role. Directed by Vicente Amori and Júlia Rezende, Senna captures the danger of F1 accurately. “I actually really fell in love with it,” Scodelario tells The Hollywood Reporter. “The intricacies of it, the politics behind it being very interesting, but also the athletes and how much they put their body through.”

Below, the actress talks to THR about shooting Senna and connecting with her heritage. She discusses how Brazilians remember exactly where they were when the driver died, the one photo of a real female motorsport journalist that served as inspiration for Laura and showing the boys how it’s done: “I’m always a rebel. If anyone says something’s a boy sport, I immediately want to go, ‘No, I can like that as much as you can.’”

What attracted you to this role?

I’d spent the last two or three years openly talking to my team — I hate that sentence! — but yes, to my people about how I really wanted to do a project in Brazil. I wanted to push myself creatively. I wanted to be able to use my Portuguese on screen. It was a dream box that I wanted ticked. But it was important for me to also find a role that justified the fact that I’m not fully Brazilian. You know, my accent isn’t perfect. I’ve never studied Portuguese. There’s conversational Portuguese that I know.

[Ayrton] Senna was a huge part of my childhood. To every Brazilian, he is a hero and an icon, and culturally so significant. And I was very aware of him. Then we heard about this project, and we heard there was a character that was a journalist that needed to somehow be bilingual, that would follow his journey, [run] parallel to him around the world throughout his career, observing him — the only fictionalized character in the show. It was like Christmas morning. Getting to shoot in Brazil, [it is] produced by Brazilians and I think, one of the largest scale productions that Brazil has ever done. Then also for it to be a story about this hero, and someone who holds so much like love. Every Brazilian that I know still remembers the day that he died, remembers where they were. It felt like this huge responsibility.

Do you remember where you were?

Well I was two, so I was probably toddling around in Brazil, but my first big memory of him was when [Universal’s Senna] documentary came out in 2010. I remember going to the cinema in Camden Town, and it was wall to wall Brazilians. I think every single Brazilian who lived in north London had booked tickets to go see it as soon as it had come out and it was just this hugely beautiful, unique experience of being in the movie theater with what I felt like were my people, my culture, where people were on their feet, screaming, openly, crying, celebrating, dancing, booing Prost every time he came on. It was the rowdiest experience, but it wasn’t rowdy. It was celebration and passion and all the things that as a half Brazilian woman, I felt confused about growing up. My two sides of my culture are such different scales of that when it comes to emotion and passion. And I felt really proud to be in that space and to feel everyone openly showing their emotions for this hero, this man, and again, [there were] lots of people who had no interest in Formula One.

Is it important that a show about Ayrton Senna’s life and career is a Brazilian production, made by the people who love him?

Definitely. Brazil’s had an incredible film industry for a very long time. We’ve always been a contender in the Oscars for foreign film. We have amazing directors and amazing Brazilian actors who have moved to the States. But there’s still this huge pool of talent out here. It’s a huge country, one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world, and that means stories. So it was important for me that it not be an Americanized version of that story. It needed to come from the hearts and the minds of Brazilians.

Is it fair to say this experience helped you connect with your Brazilian heritage?

Yes! I feel very fortunate to have had the experience. I know a lot of second generation Brazilians who haven’t grown up in the country feel that displacement and I did for a long time. I consider my culture, because I was raised in a Brazilian household, to be far more Brazilian than British. The food that I cook, the music I listen to, the way I can be so passionate and angry and loving and everything in between, it comes a lot from that, but I’d never had the experience of actually being in Brazil. This gave me the opportunity to collaborate with Brazilians to enter a world of sets and costume design and hair and makeup that was all Brazilian creativity.

Personally, for me, it was really special, because I came out with my kids and their father, and we spent six weeks living here. And I didn’t want to stay in a hotel, so we rented a little flat, and we went to the supermarket every day, and they went to the parks, and we traveled around the country and I got to see them learning about a small part of their culture. Now, my son says he feels so much more Brazilian after the experience of living here. So that was really, really special for me, and I’m super grateful for it. I think this has been the job that, not to sound wanky, but fed my soul more than anything I’ve ever done.

That doesn’t sound wanky at all! Let’s get into your character, Laura. I know she’s fictional, but did you draw any inspiration from real-life female motorsport journalists?

Unfortunately, it was super depressing trying to find evidence of female journalists in motorsport. I mean, there were two that I kind of interacted with. But especially in the ’90s and the ’80s, it was still pretty unheard of to have a woman on the track. It’s still difficult nowadays! But it was especially hard back then. It’s such a unique sport in that the athletes are immediately swarmed by press. I found this really interesting image of one female journalist in the middle of it. And you see the first image, she’s sort of swallowed by them all, and in the second, she’s fought her way right to the front. I used that as my main inspiration, just that one image. Knowing that Laura had to use her skills and her intellect and her femininity to get to the front whenever she could. So I used to have to apologize a lot to the background artists that were playing the other journalists, because I would be elbowing them and ducking underneath them and trying to fight my way to the front, because that’s what it would have been like.

We wanted her to be a combination of not only the female motorsport journalists at the time, but also the Western journalists, and what that meant for South American drivers. Formula One is such an international sport. It’s what’s really interesting about it, but the politics that come with that, the conditioned racism and biases that come along with being a driver from a certain country. I really felt that, and we touch on it in the second episode, and I wanted her to represent not only Western journalism, but that in her heart, she was Brazilian and she connected with [Senna] through that.

And we see that in the show — that small connection that they have.

It’s very much Senna’s story, and I wanted to respect that, and that’s why we were never going to do anything crazy, like introduce some sort of love of interest. That was never going to be the case. We wanted it to be his story. And Laura is the British eye, the view into his life and his trajectory and she’s there with him. She was accompanying him the whole time, understanding him. And she’s also his little connection to home every now and again.

I’m curious, were you a fan of F1 before you took on this job?

No! My auntie’s a huge fan, but I hadn’t been at all, and I was really excited by that because one of my favorite nerdy things about this job is that you get to do a bunch of research on a random subject that you never thought you’d ever look into. And that could be alligators or ice skating or Formula One. It’s like, suddenly you have to become a mastermind category: this is my specialty thing. And I actually really fell in love with it, the intricacies of it, the politics behind it being very interesting, but also the athletes and how much they put their body through.

I focused a lot of my research in the ’80s and the ’90s but then very quickly, realized that I was getting swept up in the races that were happening this year. And I’m just like, oh, fuck, this is cool! This is now something I’m really into. And I got to go to [the British Grand Prix at] Silverstone this year to watch the race. It was incredibly thrilling. Also, I’m always a rebel. If anyone says something’s a boy sport, I immediately want to go, ‘No, I can like that as much as you can.’ So I absolutely loved being surrounded by all these bros that thought they knew everything about Formula One, and I just spent a year researching it so I was able to hold my own.

F1 is so popular now, partly thanks to Drive to Survive. It’s a booming sport, globally, yet drivers of the ’90s and in particular, Senna, their legacies have really endured. I feel like F1 fans are so connected to the sport’s history, but Senna is the one driver that everyone agrees is the iconic face and name of racing. Why do you think that is?

There was a purity to his driving. It’s something that we wanted to explore in the show. It’s something that was a huge part of his childhood. His whole life was dedicated to this sport. And I think being Brazilian, the passion that came with that, there’s just a purity to his driving that is hard to replicate. It was always about the driving for him, it was always about the skill and knowing the track and studying it, and also being unafraid to go toe to toe with the regulators. And he was pushed the boundaries of the sport. I think that’s something that a lot of people admire about him as well. He never allowed anyone to tell him he couldn’t do something. I know that in the scripts, it was really important for us to emphasize that he was aware of the safety regulations and what was going on in the cars and how they were being built and how dangerous it was getting, and he spoke up about it quite openly. There was just a purity to his driving that even when you watch the footage back now, especially the ones in the rain, there’s something so beautiful about it.

Do you think Senna is a show for F1 fans, sports fans, or a show for everyone?

It’s one of those beautiful things that crosses the boundaries of all of it, much like the [2010] documentary did in that it’s essentially about this man and the greatness of him and what he represented to a country that really needed it at the time. A country that is still in awe of him. But I also think that the directors did such a good job of depicting the races as well. You’re watching it and holding your breath at the same time. So it gives you that adrenaline. It gives you that sports feeling that we enjoy so much on screen. But it’s also his story and his life through his eyes and his family, his connection to the country and his love for the sport, and how that ultimately broke his heart as well.