“I don’t even know what I’ve done this week,” Mia McKenna-Bruce tells me over Zoom. What’s happened over the past week, you may ask? Well, the How To Have Sex actor has been nominated for Bafta’s EE rising star award (which she would later go on to win) and it’s all been a “complete whirlwind”.

Directed by Molly Manning Walker, How To Have Sex is an exploration of the darker side of party culture, focusing on issues around consent, coercion and misogyny. The film follows three 16-year-old girls – Tara, Em and Skye – as they go on a rites-of-passage holiday to Malia in search of sun, parties and hookups. As the girls hop from club to club, the holiday starts off light, fun and blurry. They end up befriending a group of new friends staying in the flat opposite, including two boys, Badger and Paddy.

During one of their nights out, Tara (played by McKenna-Bruce) is sexually assaulted by Paddy but makes light of the situation to her friends. Assuming Tara is simply being coy about her budding romance with Paddy, Em and Skye continue to make jokes until it all comes to a head on their way back home in the airport.

It’s a beautiful but harrowing film that I wish existed when my friends and I were growing up. A sentiment that seems to be echoed among fans of all ages. “I didn’t have anything like this when I was younger either; it’s one of the things that pulled me into the project straight away. I knew it was special,” McKenna-Bruce shares.

Tara comes across as a confident young woman at the beginning of the film but as time goes on, the viewer starts to see that there’s a side to her that’s shy and self-conscious. “As soon as I read for Tara, she felt really real. She’s a ‘yes’ person and wants to be the class clown but there’s much more to her than what she presents to her friends and it was something I could relate to a lot,” the actor adds.

Playing multifaceted and complex female characters is an element that McKenna-Bruce wants to take with her into future projects, including her latest film Sister Wives, a queer drama that follows two young women living in a strict polygamous society as they try to navigate their feelings for one another. She started shooting on the project last week. “It’s another strong women-led project and it’s incredible so far. I just want to tell stories that matter to people, especially a powerful female story.”

McKenna-Bruce has many great memories from filming How To Have Sex, but there’s one in particular that will always stay with her. On one of the days they were supposed to be filming on the party strip, it had rained so much in Greece that everything had flooded so they had to move filming inside – with the director rewriting the scene at the last minute. “We were standing on this podium-like stage in a club, singing One Kiss by Dua Lipa at the top of our lungs with all the crew singing it back at us. It felt like we were all living our pop star dreams and Molly was both directing and DJing.”

Ahead of the awards ceremony, Stylist spoke to McKenna-Bruce about her EE Bafta rising star nomination and some of the experiences that have shaped her along the way.

“He puts everything into perspective”: Mia McKenna-Bruce on motherhood and the TV series she can’t stop thinking about