Photographs & Interview by GREG WILLIAMS
As told to JANE CROWTHER

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They met when they were cast together, married seven years later, and now live in East London. Greg Williams takes a taxi ride to the two actors’ ‘nest’ as they talk chemistry reads, dyslexia and there being no place like home.

‘Booth and Powley’, as Bel laughingly refers to herself and her husband, are finishing off a fitting at Chanel’s London HQ when I catch up with them on a fresh February day. Suited and booted in Mayfair, the duo jump in a black cab to travel home to their house in De Beauvoir, East London. ‘We’re married but we don’t have the same name,’ Booth says as he clicks his seatbelt. ‘I didn’t want to wake up and for Bel Powley to not exist anymore.’ Powley looks at him fondly and, as we sit in the capital’s traffic, I ask how the two of them first met. ‘At a chemistry read audition,’ she recalls. ‘I was so excited. Doug was really famous, and I remember telling my girlfriends. In the scene, they kissed, and I was like, ‘Should we just do it for real?’ And we kissed in the audition. Doug didn’t get the part, and I got the part.’ 

That fateful audition was three years before they were cast together in Mary Shelley – a biopic of the Frankenstein author with Powley playing stepsister to Elle Fanning’s Mary, and Booth playing the poet (Percy) Shelley. ‘I remember, on the first-ever night out, we were in Dublin,’ Booth says of the production. ‘I took a picture of Bel and I wrote on Instagram, “I love her”…’ ‘And the rest is history,’ Powley finishes his sentence. They’ve been together nine years, getting married at Petersham Nurseries in Richmond in October 2023. ‘I woke up in the morning, and I was like, “I just want to do it all over again, right now,”’ Powley says. ‘I think in 10 years’ time, we’ll get married again.’

A pair of Londoners – Booth was born in Greenwich to a painter mum and financier Dad, moving to Kent as a kid; Powley was born and bred in Shepherd’s Bush – the couple now live in a house they bought together and moved into during lockdown. They both began their careers early. Booth suffers from dyslexia, which made schooling difficult and now means reading a script is slow and his wife sometimes has to read menus in restaurants. ‘When you’re learning lines, you’re attaching words to an emotional response or an emotional journey through scenes. It’s a completely different thing,’ he explains. ‘Just words as facts on a page, I find… it swims. I just can’t put the dots together. That’s why I struggled at school.’ Focusing on acting became a way to make sense of the world for him. He was signed to an agent at 15, dropped his studies and landed a role at 16 in From Time To Time, opposite Maggie Smith and Timothy Spall. ‘I remember just being on set, having no idea about where you’re meant to stand. The idea of hitting a mark was just, you know… So I basically learned on the job.’ He never looked back. His breakout role was playing Boy George in Worried About the Boy, quickly followed by Pip in the BBC’s Great Expectations, a biblical son in Noah and a toff in The Riot Club. Last year, he wowed the Toronto International Film Festival with his role in Young Werther and awaits the release of Terrence Malick’s long-gestated The Way of the Wind.

Powley, meanwhile, Booth says proudly, was something of a ‘Hermione Granger’ at school. ‘I was a really geeky kid,’ she nods. ‘I was bullied quite badly at school. I didn’t have that many friends. I never even really wanted to be an actor. I was really academic. But my dad’s an actor [Mark Powley], and my mum’s a casting director [Janis Jaffa]. So it was always kind of in the family. I went to a Saturday drama group called Youngblood Theatre Company, which was all improvisation-based, where I met a lot of my mates. A casting director came in once to cast a CBBC show called M.I. High about child spies, and I got the job. So I basically ended up being a child actor, to my parents’ dismay, because they thought I was going to be the first academic of the family. I ended up following in my dad’s footsteps.’ Powley was nominated for BAFTA’s rising star in 2016 and has since mixed TV, theatre and film – most recently, on The Morning Show, showing the boys a thing or two as a wartime spy in Masters of the Air and as a 17th-century maid in upcoming period satire, Savage House. She’s next filming Inheritance, exploring colonialism, in Jamaica.

I ask if either of them felt that they were artists as kids. ‘When I was a teenager, I just liked acting because it was independence. I was earning my own money. I wanted to move out of home,’ Powley considers. ‘But I think it wasn’t until in my 20s when I started doing movies and other mediums that I really started to learn my own taste and creativity. What I’ve learned over time is to trust my gut instinct, and what speaks to me – that feeling is in your soul, when you read a project or start to understand the character. So yeah, now I do feel like an artist.’

‘As you get older, it’s about refining that play into something that is artistic, and that’s actually poetic, and is something that feeds your inner soul, as well as just being a game,’ Booth agrees as we pull up to their terraced house on a leafy street. ‘Also so much of our job is about an internal life. When you’re a child, you’re often having to play emotions that you’ve never actually discovered before. Your canvas just gets so much bigger when you’re older. You have your heart broken. You have your first panic attack. You need to experience a bit of life to be able to portray all of life.’ 

We hurry into the house and get the fire and peppermint tea on to chase away the chill. The duo have renovated the place and taken care to choose all aspects of the rebuild together. ‘We live such nomadic lifestyles with our job, home is really important,’ Powley says as she points out beloved items: a wedding plate made by a ceramist friend, her piano, Booth’s childhood trumpet, their Tomo Campbell painting. Booth’s trumpet case still contains a childhood handwritten note to himself that reveals his dyslexia. ‘Do not loose,’ he reads out and laughs. In a cupboard I find the pair’s camera equipment and backdrops for self-taping, and ask whether they’d like to work together again in the future. They’ve both exec-produced recent projects, says Booth; ‘We like the idea of creatively developing something together.’ For now, the thing they want to do together is pop down to the local pub. We walk to the Victorian pub a few streets away and they show me their favourite seat over a pint of Guinness, a diet Coke and a bag of crisps. It’s a cosy scene and Powley clearly feels the pull of the familiar as they discuss the travel that acting affords. ‘When I was shooting The Morning Show, we lived in LA for nine months and really loved it,’ she says and smiles at Booth. ‘But, still, the feeling of going home at the end, it’s second to none…’