Bella Ramsey: I wish I'd been more rebellious as a teenager

Bella Ramsey was eleven years old when they stepped onto the set of Game of Thrones, beginning a career that would consume their teenage years. Working alongside adults in a professional environment, Ramsey made a deliberate choice: they would not be the moody, rebellious teenager that adults seemed to expect and criticize. They would be sensible. They would be easy to work with. They would not be that.

That calculation lasted until Ramsey was twenty-one and cast in Sunny Dancer, a film about young cancer survivors at summer camp. For seven weeks on set, surrounded by younger actors who were actually living through their teenage years, Ramsey experienced something they had deferred: the freedom to be a teenager without apology. "I got to be a teenager aged 21, which was brilliant," Ramsey tells BBC News. "It was really nice—and liberating." The younger cast members became informal teachers, discussing songs and nights out, filling in the gaps of a childhood that had been spent in conference rooms and on soundstages. Ramsey learned the songs five years late, but they learned them.

Looking back now, Ramsey wonders what they gave up. "I kind of wish that I had made the most of being a teenager and getting away with things and being a bit rebellious." The question is not rhetorical. It sits underneath the film itself, which tells the story of Ivy, a young cancer survivor in remission who arrives at camp reluctant and leaves transformed. But the film's deeper architecture comes from director George Jaques, who was fifteen when his mother was diagnosed with cancer. It took him eight years before he felt ready to write about it. "I never seem to write in the moment I'm going through it," he says. "You have to sort of get through and understand it and have that reflection of it."

Jaques was careful not to simply transpose his family's story onto the screen. Instead, he scattered pieces of himself throughout the characters and consulted extensively with the Teenage Cancer Trust, meeting with young cancer survivors and parents who had lost children. One conversation stayed with him: young survivors telling him bluntly not to call them kids, not to call them brave. Those voices shaped the film. Two of the survivors he met were given roles in it. When Sunny Dancer premiered in Berlin, Jaques found himself sitting in the audience watching his own mother watch the film—and the weight of that moment hit him. "I remember realising there's a version of that movie where my mum wasn't sitting in the audience," he says.

Both Ramsey and Jaques have become convinced that society handles grief poorly. There is no general legal right to paid bereavement leave in the UK outside of parental loss. Jaques lost someone close to him at eighteen while sitting his A-levels. "We are expected to just carry on," he says, describing the instinct to go straight back to work and school as if nothing had happened. Ramsey observes the same pattern in everyday conversation: someone asks how you're doing, and you say you're fine, it's hard, but you're fine. "It feels very unhealthily British," Ramsey says. The pressure to minimize, to move on, to be resilient—it sits on people like a weight they're not supposed to acknowledge.

Jaques pushes back against the idea that young people simply need to be tougher. "There's so much pressure on young people to change on social media," he says. "Why don't we stop hating on young people? Maybe that's where we should start as well." Ramsey's advice to young people struggling to fit in is simpler: don't try. "Please don't change to try and fit in because there are people who will fit in with you." It's the kind of thing that sounds obvious until you remember that Ramsey spent their teenage years doing exactly the opposite—changing themselves to fit into an adult world, to avoid criticism, to be the kind of teenager that wouldn't cause trouble. Seven weeks on a film set gave them back something they didn't know they'd lost.