6 names to have on your radar this spring

Taken from the new print issue of THE FACE. Get your copy here.

Growing up in a village just outside Marseille, Suzy Bemba never pictured herself on the big screen: ​“I went to med school and wanted to be a surgeon.” But when she didn’t meet the near-impossible matriculation requirements, the 23-year-old decided to give acting a whirl. After being cast in French horror film Kandisha in 2020, Suzy played dancer Flora in the 2021 TV series L’Opera before bagging the role of Toinette in Poor Things, the latest melon-twister from leftfield filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos. ​“He’s not very verbal, so you have to find a way to communicate,” she says, meaning that rehearsals were more about jumping around and playing games than reading the script. Does Suzy, who’s now based in Paris, prefer acting in English or French? ​“I don’t mind what language – I could do something in Mandarin,” she says, before hastily adding a small caveat. ​“If I learn Mandarin!”

@suzybemba

Diabolically funny director Luna Carmoon reels off movie references in every other sentence. That’s thanks to her watching films every day since she was 13, when she contracted a mysterious illness that made her whole body scab over ​“like something out of a Cronenberg film” – a strong sick note to skip school. Unable to afford uni, Luna worked in her local South London branch of CeX. ​“They called me the Liv Tyler of CeX, I had superfans who would wait until I could serve them. One guy wrote fanfiction about me.” The 26-year-old quit after winning a place on the ShortFLIX filmmaking initiative. Now, after her gritty shorts Nosebleed (2018) and Shagbands (2020), comes feature-length debut Hoard, a coming-of-age drama inspired by her eccentric nan that premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival. ​“I make stuff for 14-year-old me wanting to find films on Putlocker,” she says. Or kids off sick with inexplicable scabs.

@lunacarmoon

Louis Newby, 27, has been obsessed with collecting imagery his entire life. The South East Londoner did his foundation degree at Falmouth University, then fine art at Chelsea College of Arts. He began sticking together archive queer imagery, using vegetable fat Crisco, once used as lube by gay men, as glue: ​“I wanted an intimacy [with] the images, to make them literally rub up against one another,” he says of the collages. Enrolling at Slade School of Art, Louis began collaborating with fellow artist Laila Majid, scanning ​“the swamps of Pornhub” and eBay for vintage dirty mags, then putting on shows at discerning London galleries. Most eye-poppingly, their efforts spawned Contact (The Kiss), a drawing of a porn still that depicted a rubber hood-wearing gimp in a lip-lock with a figure wearing facial prosthetics: ​“The video was crazy. But [Contact] was actually very tender,” he insists.

@louisnewby

Songwriting is in Finn Foxell’s DNA. The 23-year-old rapper’s dad co-wrote D:Ream’s adoptive ​’90s New Labour anthem Things Can Only Get Better and his brother was a grime MC. No wonder the West Londoner started scribing lyrics as a kid. His first song? ​“I put a swear word in it and got scared and scrunched it up behind the sofa so my family couldn’t find it,” he says. Spoiler: ​“They found it.” In his teens, Finn started to record over beats produced by his brother and linked up with schoolmates and fellow musicians P‑Rallel and Lord Apex, with his pinch-me moment coming when he performed at Glasto last year. Having settled on a gritty, guitar-backed sound typified by the Tory-bashing banger Leaders, Finn is now keen to bring his cheeky chappy chutzpah to the acting world. ​“Something quintessentially British would be sick. Peaky Blinders, put me in the mix!”

@finnfoxell

The life of an artistic gymnast moves at a dizzying speed. But Hertfordshire-born Ondine Achampong is used to it, having started in the sport when she was three. Now 20, Ondine has a heaving trophy shelf thanks to a silver medal at the World Championships and a gold at the Commonwealth Games. Does she still get nervous? ​“Not as much as I used to. The girls on the GB team know what to do when I get stressed,” she says, explaining that chatting their ears off before competing helps. Hoping to ace the trials for this summer’s Paris Olympics, Ondine is also vaulting across the pond to join the California Golden Bears team at the University of California, Berkeley. Her pet tortoise Michelle will likely be joining her. Is she a gymnast, too? ​“I’ve made little stairs that go up to the enclosure. She likes to throw herself off.”

@ondineachampong

Kai Alexander milked every morsel of his debut acting gig: stuffing the Honey Monster into his wardrobe for a Sugar Puffs ad. ​“It’s when I decided I wanted to be an actor,” the Worcestershire-born 26-year-old says about his cereal drama. After spending his early teenage years making parkour videos with his best mate, Kai enrolled at West London drama school ArtsEd and, in 2017, landed a recurring role in cult Channel 4 sitcom Catastrophe. You might also recognise him from Netflix’s The Stranger and Danny Boyle’s Pistol. Or from his latest project, Apple TV+’s star-studded WWII miniseries Masters of the Air. Pre-production took some mettle, involving a gruelling military boot camp with Marine veteran and Hollywood consultant Captain Dale Dye. ​“We had to learn how to drop bombs, fire machine guns and drop into a parachute jump.” Let’s hope he had more than Sugar Puffs for brekkie.

STYLIST’S ASSISTANT Miranda Mikkola PRODUCER Chloe Slattery