Playing for keeps

After making her name in EastEnders, Tilly Keeper is once again stealing the show-in Netflix's You

- DAISY JONES

IT WAS EARLY 2022 and the I actress Tilly Keeper - now 25 - didn't seem to be landing any major roles. She'd spent four years playing Louise Mitchell in the iconic BBC soap EastEnders, where she'd blackmailed, bullied and screamed her way through Albert Square (as she should). But since leaving in 2020, the wheels of fortune just didn't seem to be turning. "I was having screen tests for really great shows or chemistry reads and I wasn't getting them," she remembers, shrugging. "It was like, 'Oh, you're too tall, too old, too young' - whatever the generic excuses are. I really wanted a job on a show that I really wanted to be on. That was the gut-wrenching thing."

But then, as these things often go, one well-timed conversation led to another, and before she knew it, she was being considered for the fourth season of You, Netflix's buzzy psychological thriller about an obsessive romantic/serial murderer, the first half of which came out in early February. "I put myself on tape and then a week later I had a meeting and the next morning I found out I got the part," she says. One month later, they were filming. And she found herself transforming into Lady Phoebe, a mega-wealthy, albeit sweet and wide-eyed London socialite with a lot of horrible friends.