The Heart and the Gut with Maisie Richardson-Sellars

Words by Karen Leong | Photography by Pierre Toussaint

Maisie Richardson-Sellers was trained to think and do one thing at a time. It’s how she mined the origins of culture at Oxford University, delving into the history of archaeology and anthropology. After a not-so-brief academic stint, she moved into directing and a spot of jewellery making, before alighting on performance. The vein of study flowed naturally because she considered herself to be academically rigorous. This is why, with acting, she had to throw everything out and start anew. “I had to understand my own brain, and the physical doing of something,” the British actress and director laughs.

It’s why with Nine Perfect Strangers she breezes along as Wolfie, a magnetic, androgynous force wading through her crumbling relationship. Wolfie appears in the alpine tundra of a wellness retreat, codependent and in survival mode. “Her partner is pulling away from her, and she doesn’t know who she is and what she is without her,” Richardson-Sellers says, knowingly.

Even before her showdown with a sharply bobbed Nicole Kidman, she’s played powerful women with a taint of darkness – even if these characters can largely conceal the darkness, it shows through. Just before our call, Richardson-Sellers undertook two auditions – one character was at the peak of a mental breakdown, the other was sensual, uninhibited. Last year she played an aristocrat, the tremulous Chloe Winthrop in The Kissing Booth, and most recently, as Wolfie, she was prone to lapsing into bouts of anxiety.

Over time, wearing Wolfie’s skin started to chafe. “I’ve got to be careful not to allow Wolfie’s feelings to become Maisie’s feelings. You have to be careful with those boundaries,” she explains.

Nine Perfect Strangers was filmed under a sheet of snow, in a whole other world. In the fictional resort Zauberwald, and the very real set fringed with talent such as Kidman, Bobby Cannavale and Henry Golding, it was a snow globe in which Richardson-Sellers could sit back and watch the tape playing back, only in real time.

“The emotional journeys of each character were huge over the arc of the season, and you see the shift in everyone when they unshackle from themselves,” she recalls. “There’s always a chance of change. And you always want to commit to it.” Be it on set in the Austrian Alps or the terms on which the actress envisions her own life plan, at 33 years old she is breaking free in order to build something larger than herself.

Maisie Richardson-Sellers grew up in a quirky household with no TV, which meant the requisite form of entertainment was textual. Her parents, both actors – Guyanese and English – nourished her hunger for creative expression. She holds Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in high regard. She loves a book that sucks her into a world and makes her feel completely different yet a part of it. For the stage, she’s drawn to plays that explore marginalised communities and the resilience and power within them.

“Art with activism is the only way I make sense of the world,” says Richardson-Sellers, who opts to lead with compassion. Hate doesn’t cure hate, and the actress believes that no matter what pursuit, her work will speak for itself, and she will always rise above. In the global landscape, the heaviness is inextricably felt and it’s hard not to feel defeated by the ongoing context of what’s happening across many borders. But she remains committed to feeling the situation and believes there’s no point in denying it: “I feel bad, we all do. But how do you turn this pain and defeatist feeling into action?”

Every day, the actress selects a small, unassuming task to support, challenge or inspire in whatever way she can. She is aware that her powers are finite but can boomerang: “I am humbled by the gift of having a platform. I won’t let that go to waste.”

Time and opportunity will never be wasted either. While living in Los Angeles four years ago, a voice in her head told Richardson-Sellers she needed to move to New York. She went home and packed up her life, and says it was the best decision she made. The actress has since lived in every pocket of the city – from Upper West Side to Chinatown to Prospect Heights. She always sublets, so will rent out a flat for a couple of months at a time.

With the foreground constantly shifting, Richardson-Sellers has a ritual for maintaining some consistency – waking, walking and thinking, sometimes with a freshly brewed matcha and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way ‘Morning Pages Journal’ in hand. “This helps with grounding,” she says. “No matter where I am in the world, I can bring myself and my world with me.”

As another means of remaining rooted to herself, the actress tunes into the cultural scene of wherever she happens to be. When filming The Kissing Booth in South Africa, she went out into the townships in the hopes of chancing upon some local art. By fate, she discovered a queer feminist film festival organized by the Triangle Project, one of the country’s largest LGBTQI+ rights organisations.

“It was three days of panels and screenings that were extremely diverse, and the conversations were so inspiring. People packed out tiny places in the middle of the township. People flooded in from every corner of the world,” she recalls. “Everything that I saw had rigour – rigour from which they grabbed their very traumatic history and turned it into strength.”

Richardson-Sellers met the organisers of the night and, from that instant, kicked off her very own working relationship with them. Her golden rule? “Trust your instincts… Whereas your mind will play tricks on you, lean on instincts alone, and they will lead you to some incredible places,” she says, adding that whenever she feels a surge of excitement, she knows she’s operating in sequence with the path ahead.

What she has successfully intuited, in fact, might have been what led her to her current partner, film producer Saba Kia. The pair met at a Queer Filmmakers event Richardson-Sellers was hosting. “We hit it off, like two old souls meeting,” she laughs. Their first date lasted for eight hours. However, their meeting happened right before the actress would embark on production for Nine Perfect Strangers, meaning that the one perfect date would have to be followed up in the flesh approximately six months later.

Patience paid off. The pair talked well into the night most evenings, until they finally reconnected: “Walking to the shops was the most exciting thing ever,” Richardson-Sellers reveals. The couple shared a handful of stolen moments – but the intimacy and the depth of connection had accelerated. A weekend here and there, triangulating both women (and their schedules) to go on short trips to Amsterdam and Lisbon, where they could potter around storefronts and wine bars.

The connection also extended beyond the shared corners of their new relationship and into the realm of co-developing projects. It makes sense that the next thing in Richardson-Sellers’ line of vision is resurrecting her own production company – Barefaced Productions was originally a 2020 project that COVID-19 shut down. Five years on, she is intent on imbuing her baby with a new edge – and a new co-architect. The multidisciplinary duo has been incubating ideas for films and upcoming documentaries specifically focused on queer and marginalised communities. Their projects are currently in development, with a goal for Barefaced Productions to launch as early as 2026.

Developing creative projects is not new for Richardson-Sellers, who devoted much of her free time to organising poetry readings and exhibitions in East London. Which she says felt charged with, “the energy of the revolution… It’s because that’s my heart,” she explains, adding that she is like a moth to a flame when it comes to passion projects.

Being willing to adapt and give new things a try is second nature. Aged just 21, Richardson-Sellers was just starting production on the set of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Her agent told her it was time to go to Los Angeles (LA) and really ‘begin something’. At that point, she had never even been to the sprawling city and had never travelled so far alone. Upon arriving at the airport, Richardson-Sellers promptly burst into tears and called her parents. Then she got on with the task ahead and threw herself into the fray, going to meetings, living on a minimal stipend and relying on buses to get around – she once travelled two hours for a 10-minute meeting.

Richardson-Sellers kept reminding herself to stay focused, and the right thing would come, although the right thing didn’t materialise on that first trip: “But after I came back to London, I connected with someone who got me a show, and that was The Originals, which kickstarted my American chapter.”

Whenever she feels like she’s reaching the end of her tether, her gut kicks in and she goes one step further than what she believes that she can, and that’s when things shift. The universe is a masochist, but the actress has proven to the powers that be that she has earned her place, and her resilience.