Ah, the joys of Instagram versus reality. Online, Suki Waterhouse’s American tour of her angsty heartbreak music is all glittery bralets and backstage glamour. When we talk in real life, though, the singer/actress/model is stuck in a budget hotel’s conference room in Colorado thanks to a snowstorm. Where in Colorado exactly? “No idea. I’m constantly googling, ‘Where am I?’ ” she says, checking her phone to learn that she’s in a city called Sterling.
After releasing an EP and an album last year — dream pop with echoes of Lana Del Rey — she is now performing to her adoring fans almost nightly and sleeping on a tour bus, while being driven across the country in the early hours. The photo I see of her bus bunk is claustrophobia-inducing. “It’s like a little coffin,” she says. “There’s something quite nice about it — it’s strangely cocooning and relaxing.”
Waterhouse is clearly a glass-half-full sort, but she has reason to be buoyant. After more than a decade of grafting as a model (including for Burberry and Marks & Spencer) and an actress (in the 2014 rom-com Love, Rosie and the 2016 dystopian movie The Bad Batch, for example), she has not only established herself as a respected musician, but also landed a plum part in Daisy Jones & the Six, a TV series based on Taylor Jenkins Reid’s hit novel about a fictional Seventies band. “It takes a lot of starts and stops and constantly going, OK, that door’s not opening, that door’s not opening, where can I go next?” she says of plugging away to reach such success.
In her twenties, bouncing between London and Los Angeles with glossy friends that included Cara Delevingne, Waterhouse lived the party life of a bright young thing. At 21 she started dating the 38-year-old A-list actor Bradley Cooper (who then went on to date the Victoria’s Secret model Irina Shayk), moved to Hollywood and pursued an acting career, while quietly writing music on the side.
Now 31, Waterhouse is relieved to be touring with a wiser head on her shoulders. She isn’t drinking while on the road and sticks to her e-cigarette (“my one addiction”), while her bandmates enjoy a joint. “I’m the boring one on the bus,” she says. “I’m definitely not living like a rock star.” Spending the days waiting to find a shower is tiresome, but she’s sanguine about being away from her Twilight/Batman heart-throb boyfriend, Robert Pattinson, whom she lives with in London. “I had two days off the other day, and it was like, no question I’m going back to see him. Then he’ll come out for a couple of days.”
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The couple have been together since 2018 — “I’m shocked that I’m so happy with someone for nearly five years” — and two months is their longest stint apart, which is surprising for a pair so in demand. Do they give each other acting advice? “Rob definitely isn’t getting advice from me about acting, but of course I’ll try and get him to help me with an audition before he falls asleep on the sofa.”
In Daisy Jones & the Six, an Amazon Prime series that catapults viewers to sunny Seventies California, with its crocheted decor, colourful camper vans and dark undercurrents of addiction and infidelity, Waterhouse plays Karen Sirko, an ambitious, sexpot keyboardist, opposite the leads Riley Keough and Sam Claflin. Fighting hard for the part, she flew back to LA on her own dime because she wanted to audition again. “They felt like they’d seen me already,” she says. “I don’t think it was going in my direction.”
The decision-makers on the series were determined that the actresses in the running for Karen had properly learnt to play the keyboard, so in December 2020 Waterhouse called her pal Taron Egerton to find out who coached him before he played Elton John in the 2019 biopic Rocketman; he pointed her to an “unbelievably patient” Welsh music teacher. The production team had told her to learn Light My Fire by the Doors. “That song haunts Rob now,” she says, laughing. “He heard me play that for hours and hours. He had ear muffs on in the corner, he was about to leave me.” Thankfully her hard graft paid off and her relationship remained intact.
We’re speaking shortly after Keough’s mother, Lisa Marie, the only child of Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley, died of a heart attack aged 54. Waterhouse is hesitant to talk about that tragedy, but recalls how Keough “cultivated joy” on set and was mesmerising to watch sing. It sounds as if she genuinely made friends with Keough and her other co-stars: “Given this shoot was over two years of our lives, when we look back at the first photos of rehearsals, we see ourselves as a bunch of babies.” Another new chum is the 25-year-old model Camila Morrone, an ex of Leonardo DiCaprio’s, who shows off impressive acting chops in the series: “She’s a whirlwind. You’ll be completely taken away by her.” Like Morrone, for a time Waterhouse was best known for being the “girlfriend of” an older, bigger star, although she refuses to be resentful of the erstwhile “girlfriend of” media labelling. “You can’t expect the world to just be graciously understanding of everything,” she says, tousling her fringe. “When you’re 21 you go headfirst into things and you’ve absolutely no idea what the repercussions are.”
Without mentioning any ex-boyfriend by name, she says her music — which she slowly drip-fed online to her fans for years before signing with a record label — was inspired by “a colossal heartbreak” in her twenties. “I was kind of depressed for a while,” she says. “It stuck around for a long time. I think it was the break-up and also just being in my twenties and in the f***ing trenches.” During that heartache her old partner’s new relationship was all over the internet. “You constantly read about how much more beautiful the new girlfriend is or whatever. That sounds silly, but when you’re actually the one that’s heartbroken, it’s pretty rough.” Plus, she adds, there was “public humiliation, a lot of shame”.
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Now, though, Waterhouse is “utterly healed” and happily loved up: “Oh God, what on earth will I write about now?” Certainly her romance with Pattinson, 36, seems soppy ballad territory; what makes their relationship work? “I’m always incredibly excited when I see his name pop up [on my phone] or even a text, and I think he feels the same about me,” she says. “We’ve always got so much to say, and I find him hilarious.”
The pair come from similar backgrounds: both grew up in affluent families in southwest London and found professional success in their teens (and later endured highly publicised relationship implosions). “We always say that I never, ever would have thought I’d go out with a boy from Barnes, and he didn’t think he’d go out with a girl from Chiswick,” Waterhouse says.
Growing up with three younger siblings, including her sister, Immy, who’s also an actress, and her parents, Norman, a plastic surgeon (“that makes it seem like he just does people’s boobs, but he’s an astonishing craniofacial surgeon”), and her mother, Elizabeth, a counsellor in a school, home life was “joyful and heavily dysfunctional and chaotic”. Her parents married while her mother was pregnant with Suki and she fainted at the altar — “she fully fell back and the best man caught her” — and though they’re still together, Waterhouse describes them as having had a turbulent relationship: “Even in the volatile moments I’ve definitely always felt like they were magnetised to each other.”
Talk turns to the conversation that refuses to go away: the famous offspring of famous folk, aka nepotism babies. “I saw a Twitter discussion about me, and someone was like, ‘Listen, she’s not a nepo baby but she has nepo baby energy,’ ” she says, guffawing. “I’ll take that.” Besides, if anyone’s to blame for the rise of showbiz nepo babies, she adds, it’s the audience. “It’s not an industry where you need a complete résumé. It’s based off attention and what we give attention.”
Waterhouse’s career began aged 16 after being scouted by a model agent. She paints a grim picture of the industry back then, explaining that she was “not really the body type that was needed”. One teenage summer she substituted coffees for proper food to shed weight: “I got myself down to where I needed to be, which was pretty horrendous.” Later, after regaining weight, her bosses told her that she wouldn’t be put forward for fashion week jobs: “I remember sobbing.”
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Modelling money wasn’t great at the beginning — “maybe £400 a month” — and some of the photographers were predatory creeps. “How on earth were we all being sent over there at 15, 16?” she says, recalling how she later learnt of one she’d worked with being sent to prison. “I remember hearing of them telling agents to tell the girls to not wear pants or something like that. For the agents to not really care about that kind of comment is indicative of where it was at at that point. I don’t think we’re at that point any more.”
Despite the downsides of modelling, the accompanying fast-lane lifestyle was a “great time” and to this day she remains close friends with Delevingne (“one of the most incredible spirits I’ve ever known”) and Georgia May Jagger. Shortly before Prince Harry met Meghan Markle in 2016, he let his hair down with Waterhouse a few times. “He came to a party at my house once and was absolutely lovely and really sweet,” she says. “I had uncles and aunts and everyone there.”
Waterhouse has a realistic approach to fame. “There’s a machine you can feed if you want to,” she says, adding that she is conscious to ride the “longevity wave” instead. “You don’t want to be in people’s faces all the time. They get really annoyed with you.” One trick for keeping under the radar, she says, is to avoid glitzy neighbourhoods such as Notting Hill — “pick an area where it’s older people”. It sounds as if R-Patz, to use his tabloid moniker, is more paranoid about the paparazzi. “That’s part of his bit, wearing a mask … but he thinks people are chasing him even if we’re on the couch,” she says. “He’s just got that mentality.”
Waterhouse’s career is booming, and behind the smiles and messy fringe she has a steely ambition to keep knocking down doors: “As an artist, I’ve always felt like you’re running out of time.” Work aside, she wants children at some point and acknowledges there’s no such thing as the perfect time. “You have to be like, ‘I’m going be a sitting cow for a bit of time,’ but it’s going to be worth it,” she says, laughing. “I can’t wait. I wish you could click your fingers to make it happen.”
Daisy Jones & the Six is on Amazon Prime Video from March 3, with new episodes weekly
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Styling: Celia Azoulay. Hair: Braydon Nelson (@braydon_nelson). Make-up: Benjamin Puckey at the Wall Group for Clé de Peau Beauté. Nails: Maki Sakamoto at the Wall Group using Chanel. Set design: Bjelland + Closmore. Local production: ArtWorld (artworld.agency)
