By Editor,Maddy Fletcher

Copyright dailymail

Saffron Hocking is not going to tell me who will, or should, be the next James Bond. The 31-year-old actress is the star of Fuze, a new heist film. Alongside Hocking, its cast includes Theo James and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Both men are big British actors and big Bond favourites. I observe this coincidence to Hocking.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘they never told me anything! I don’t know whether they are [in the running]. But how cool is that?’ If she had to pick who should be the next 007, who would it be? ‘Out of both of them?’ Yes. ‘I can’t! No! You can’t ask me that. They’re both so different – in their acting styles and as people.’ She pauses, then adds, ‘I think they would make such different, but amazing, Bonds,’ which is very, very diplomatic.

Fuze premiered this month at the Toronto International Film Festival – but it’s not Hocking’s only major movie this year. She’s also in Hedda, an adaptation of the Henrik Ibsen play Hedda Gabler, which stars Imogen Poots and Tessa Thompson and will be in cinemas next month.

The two projects seem, frankly, like they were quite different on-set experiences. Fuze was shot in London and Hocking plays a bomb disposal expert. She shared most of her scenes with Taylor-Johnson who, as well as being ‘just a dream’, did all his own stunts. ‘They’d got a stunt double for me,’ says Hocking, ‘but when I saw Aaron I was, like, well now I want to do my own stunts!’ (She ended up doing one stunt that required ‘sort of falling backwards’. Hocking promises it was more thrilling than it sounds.)

Also on set were Nick Orr, Freddie Kemp and Kay Howells, three ex-Royal Marines who trained the actors in bomb disposal. ‘You have to make these “mitigation walls” that you build with sand,’ says Hocking, quite expertly. Does she think she could dispose of a bomb now? ‘No, no, no. But I could call Nick or Freddie or Kay and they could talk me through it.’

Hedda, meanwhile, was shot at Flintham Hall, a Grade-I listed stately home in Nottinghamshire. Hocking got the cast hooked on games of Uno in between takes – so much so that the production team erected a designated card-playing tent they called ‘the casino’. On Instagram, where she has 783,000 followers, Hocking describes herself in her bio as an ‘undefeated Uno champion’. Is that true? ‘Oh, yeah,’ she says, laughing. ‘Maybe I lost a game here or there – but that’s just me letting other people win.’

Hocking is best known for playing Lauryn in the Netflix series Top Boy and was Bafta-nominated for the role in 2023. But Hedda and Fuze will be her first proper film roles. Does she feel, while she waits for them to come out, like she’s on the edge of something big? She nods. Is that scary? ‘No. I’m not scared. I’m excited.’

She was born and raised in Greenwich, South London, an only child. Hocking declines to reveal her parents’ professions but says they were ‘totally outside the acting industry’. Her mother is from the Anambra region of Nigeria and her father is from Penzance in Cornwall. Hocking visited both places growing up but went to Cornwall more regularly given it is, in her words, ‘a bit easier to get to than Nigeria’.

It sounds like it was a loud and happy home. Her mum is a ‘strong Nigerian woman’, who is ‘constantly performing’. This year, for instance, Hocking was invited to watch the tennis at Wimbledon by the luggage brand Antler and took her mother as her date. On the day, Hocking senior managed to chat to Tim Henman, have a cup of tea with the rapper Headie One and befriend all the security guards to the extent that they began referring to her as ‘Wimble-mum’. Her father, however, is a ‘very sensitive soul’ who writes poems in his spare time. They are both, she says, ‘my best friends’.

Hocking went to a local independent girls’ school – Blackheath High – which sounds like it was loud and happy, too. ‘The banter you have at an all-girls’ school, man. All the people I know who went to all-girls’ schools, we are funny people – if I may say so myself. We were such terrors!’ (Before our interview, a colleague tells me his wife knew of Hocking in their school days. Apparently, she was always at all the ‘cool parties’. Meeting her in person – confident, chatty and funny – this makes sense.)

She did weekend acting classes as a teenager and, at 18, got a place at the academy of Live & Recorded Arts (Alra), a drama school in London whose alumni include Hannah Waddingham, Miranda Hart and Denise Gough. On the first day of term, Hocking discovered she was the only person in her year who wasn’t white. ‘Looking back now at that experience, I realise it’s not normal. But at the time I was, like: “Oh, maybe this is just the norm. Maybe there’s not that many of us.”’ In general, she says, the industry – and especially her time on Top Boy – has since proved more diverse. ‘So that’s sort of un-soured my experience.’

Hocking left Alra early, after being spotted by an agent in her final year and immediately got a part in a play called Pitcairn at The Globe. The audience was sometimes starry; one night, she remembers seeing Sir Ian McKellen standing at the front of the crowd. ‘He had his arms propped up on the stage, watching like this,’ she says, miming looking upwards, dreamily. For the rest of the performance, Hocking couldn’t take her eyes off McKellen. ‘It was a two-person show. Me and him!’

Pitcairn was an impressive first job and it was followed by an impressive first film audition: for the lead female role in the 2015 sequel to Star Wars. Sadly, says Hocking, the whole thing was a fiasco. ‘You know, at drama school I’d been trained for theatre.’ It meant that she got into the audition room and went full thesp. ‘My arms were probably in the air. It would say in the script “she whispers” but I’d be screaming.’ The part went to Daisy Ridley, who is now one of Hocking’s closest friends. ‘I worked with her husband [Tom Bateman] on Hedda and he always says, “The biggest mistake I ever made was introducing you and Daisy, because the two of you are so obsessed with each other.”’

Post Pitcairn, Hocking did ‘bits and bobs’: an episode of Doctors; a role in the BBC comedy White Gold; playing a stormtrooper in a live-action Star Wars animation game. The latter starred Oscar Isaac and Hocking bumped into him while dressed in her full robotic regalia. ‘He said: “You look badass!” And I was like,’ she makes a giant gasp. (Years later, Hocking was in Isaac’s Marvel series Moon Knight, and he remembered her. Or someone in his team reminded him of her. She was chuffed either way.)

She did temp work and didn’t call herself a full-time actor until she got the Top Boy part in 2019. ‘And don’t get me wrong, you still always have this innate fear in you that…’ she doesn’t finish her sentence, because the photographer walks in and hugs her goodbye. But I suspect she was going to say that it could all disappear at any moment.

For those who didn’t watch it, Top Boy was, for a lot of people, massive. The story followed two drug dealers in London and starred the rapper Kano and the Adolescence actor Ashley Walters. It first came out in 2011 on Channel 4, and, although it only ran for two seasons, developed cult status.

Among its fans was the very famous rapper Drake. In fact, the Canadian musician liked Top Boy so much that, in 2019, he persuaded Netflix to recommission it, with him as an executive producer, for a third – and then fourth and fifth – season. Top Boy 2.0 had the original cast plus some extra stars: the Irish actor Barry Keoghan, rappers Little Simz and Dave, and model Adwoa Aboah.

Hocking got involved in the show almost by accident. She met a girl at the gym – ‘it was a body pump class’ – who worked for Des Hamilton, the casting director responsible for Top Boy. Hocking said she was an actor, and the girl invited her to audition. Weeks later, she’d got a lead part. (Hamilton, who cast films like This Is England and Jojo Rabbit, has remained Hocking’s ‘biggest champion’ in the industry. He worked on Fuze and Hedda and suggested her to both directors.)

Those latter seasons of Top Boy were put up for 13 Baftas – including, in 2023, a best supporting actress nomination for Hocking. She took her mum and dad as her dates to the ceremony. Apparently, they made for an excited but distracted pair. ‘My parents love Damian Lewis and we were sitting right behind him,’ says Hocking. ‘They spent the whole night looking at him – staring at the back of his head.’

In the UK, Hocking is signed to Insight Management, the same agency that represents The Crown star Emma Corrin. And last year she joined Untitled Entertainment in the States – whose clients include Dakota Johnson, Emma Watson and Jane Fonda.

So the obvious question is, what will she do next? ‘Let’s see, let’s see!’ she says, coy but smiling. She would love to do a horror film, though maybe not one with ghosts because she finds them scary. (I ask if Hocking believes in the supernatural and she says, in an embarrassed sort of way, that the answer ‘is not a no’.) And her dream co-star would be Denzel Washington. ‘Ooooh, or Jack Nicholson! People say he looks like my dad.’

A ghost-free horror starring Denzel Washington or Jack Nicholson would be good. And, actually, I wonder if Hocking will reunite with Theo James or Aaron Taylor-Johnson. She would make an excellent Bond girl.

Hedda is out on 29 October on Prime Video