Centre Stage: Siena Kelly on Staying Grounded in an Ever-Changing World

When Siena Kelly says she’s afraid of losing basic life skills to technology, she isn’t exaggerating. This is a woman who’s deleted social media for the past eight years, is currently on a three-month break from streaming platforms, and frequently takes conscious detoxes from food delivery apps. While most of us are tiktoking “easy dinners” and doom scrolling, Siena’s pole dancing, teaching yoga, and cooking real meals from scratch, all in the name of staying grounded, and self-reliant.

Photographer: Jemima Marriot Stylist: Jaime Jarvis Hair: Dionne Smith Makeup: Francesca Brazzo

That may sound idyllic and mildly intimidating, but don’t worry, the actor has a talent for making self-discipline sound like a warm hug rather than a lecture. She laughs about it, but underneath the jokes is a serious desire not to be swept along by the current of digitisation, to resist a world increasingly designed to make us passive. “I want to feel dependent on myself,”.

This defiant self-trust is exactly what makes Siena so captivating to watch.

Many actors start their careers on a stage. Kelly started hers on her tiptoes, in a dance class at three years old perfecting a discipline that, ironically, would one day drive her straight toward the chaos she was learning to suppress. Her intrinsic rejection of the world’s addiction to conformity (in all facets of her life) would, one day, mean that the carefully measured movements of dance would eventually feel too tight for her spirit and too rigid for a mind full of questions.

Her performances are powered by the same fluid energy that made her question the militant nature of professional dance training, where, as she puts it, the unspoken message was ‘shut the f*ck up and do as you’re told’. “I felt like I had to dim myself. That’s not me.”

The words land with weight.

It’s clear that Siena’s never done well with instructions that stifle her intuition. It’s why acting, with its demand for interpretation, disagreement, and creative tension, felt like home. I wonder if she knew even back then that her entire career, from starring in the BBC’s Domino Day to leading a soon-to-premiere feminist Tudor drama at the Almeida Theatre, would be a gentle, pointed rebellion against being told what to do.

“I remember being in my first play and watching another actor disagree with the director — my heart was pounding!” she tells me, grinning. “But then I realised, they actually want your opinion. They want you to challenge things. They want tension. They want people who don’t just say ‘yes’ all the time.”

You get the impression Siena could never just be someone who says ‘yes’ without questioning. She’s far too curious, far too reflective, and, perhaps most endearingly, far too afraid of becoming complacent. It’s this freedom she allows herself, to question, and to breathe her own spirit into a role, that makes her performances feel alive.

Photographer: Jemima Marriot Stylist: Jaime Jarvis Hair: Dionne Smith Makeup: Francesca Brazzo

In Domino Day, Siena plays the title character in a near-constant state of survival mode. “I had to be like a mountain.” With shifting directors, changing crews, and an emotionally gruelling storyline that rarely gave her a break, she became the fixed point everyone relied on. She credits her dance training, that iron discipline and resilience, for getting her through. But it was her questioning mind, the same one that couldn’t sit still in a rigid ballet class, that made Domino feel so layered and human.

Now, Siena’s stepping into new worlds. Quite literally. She’s just wrapped filming on an episode of Black Mirror, the ultimate dystopian fever dream, exploring (among other things) parallel realities and the collapse of trust in one’s own perception. “Our episode is actually one of the more fun ones,” she says, before adding that it still ends in darkness. 

Of course it does. 

It’s interesting that the premise of Siena’s Black Mirror episode is one that actually hits quite close to home for her. Its themes are one of the reasons why, in real life, she’s fiercely protective of her reality. Her fear of losing her independence has become its own little dystopian nightmare; one in which she becomes so reliant on tech that she forgets how to cook or clean or connect with people. The nightmare is so harrowing that it’s spurred her to build her own version of a parallel world, one where she can live independently of all the machines, cook her own food, show up fully in her body, and think for herself. Black Mirror imagines techno-dystopias, Siena’s already opted out of them. 

There’s a beautiful irony there - an actor who thrives in alternate realities consciously building her own alternate reality in the real world. “I haven’t had social media for eight years. I take breaks from streaming platforms, delivery apps, even cab apps. It’s about not losing the skill of being human,”. She laughs as she says this and the joy doesn’t come across as performative, it actually seems to be rooted in genuine relief, the kind of laugh you hear from someone who’s dodged a trap.

If dystopia is the loss of choice, Siena’s everyday choices are a quiet resistance. She’s still dancing through life but in her world, the creativity is never about bending to someone else’s choreography. It all ties back to embodiment, a word that hovers around her like an aura. “Movement always inspires me. Shaking your body, running, dancing. It gets me out of my head and into something real.”

This movement, in fact, seems to be Siena’s lifeblood. Even when sitting still, you feel like she’s vibrating slightly, itching to step into something unknown.

Photographer: Jemima Marriot Stylist: Jaime Jarvis Hair: Dionne Smith Makeup: Francesca Brazzo

It’s unsurprising that this restlessness drew her to 1536, opening at the Almeida Theatre in May. A story of women confronting political turmoil during Henry VIII’s reign, and shaking off systems that weren’t designed for them. The concept of the play feels eerily familiar. The parallels to our current world are obvious. Power structures bending to the will of a single, unpredictable leader, the rules shifting on a whim, everyone else scrambling to adjust. “There’s something very Trumpy about Henry VIII. One guy, acting on a whim, changing the entire world order because… he can.” She shakes her head. “We’re all still dealing with that same arrogance, centuries later.”

Her character (whom she describes as “mouthy and hot”) and her co-leads exist in a space between chaos and survival; not unlike her own refusal to accept pre-written scripts for how women, actors, or people in general are supposed to exist.

Maybe that’s why she gravitates toward stories where women are not passive subjects but active forces of change; characters who question, challenge, and ultimately refuse to adhere to someone else’s arbitrarily created ceiling. Just like her. 

Siena isn’t interested in playing characters that fit into a mould or mirror the glossy ideals often seen on screens. She’s drawn to roles that demand more of her emotionally, physically, and intellectually, where her appearance is secondary to the depth and complexity of the character. Women are often reduced to their looks before all else, Siena is committed to challenging that narrative. Her characters are multi-dimensional, powerful in ways that go beyond the superficial. And when she looks at her body, the same one that’s been the subject of so much attention and critique in her career, she doesn’t see just a vessel for performance. She sees it as a tool, a source of energy, an expression of everything she’s experienced and everything she’s still becoming.

And that’s where her magic seems to lie. She’s constantly resisting neat categories. She isn’t a dancer or an actor, she’s both. Not disciplined or rebellious, but both. 

As we wrap up, I ask what’s inspiring her right now. She mentions ‘The Madonna Secret’ by Sophie Strand, a writer who sews mythology, ecology, and the poetry of interconnectedness into lush, surreal worlds. This seems to be quite an apt description of Siena herself: a myth-maker in motion, deeply connected to the earth, but unafraid to explore parallel realities.

Siena Kelly’s whole life is a refusal to settle for the obvious version of reality. Something of an anti-dystopian heroine herself, her determination to live offline, off-script, and on her own terms is deeply inspiring.

If the world ever does collapse into the dystopian chaos of a Black Mirror episode, I know whose ship I’d want to be on. She’ll be the one steering it. With both hands.