Suki Waterhouse had reached the final stage of pregnancy; the “couldn’t travel, couldn’t really go outside, could barely walk” stage, when she decided to move a makeshift recording studio into her Los Angeles home. She and her partner, actor Robert Pattinson, were in full-on nesting mode: she was doing a “complete excavation” of her “Virginia Woolf disaster room” – a fashion and God-knows-what-else dumping ground – to turn it into a nursery; Rob was “doing things he’s never done before”, says Waterhouse, 32, “like driving to [shopping mall] The Grove at 6pm on a Saturday evening and staring at Williams Sonoma pans”.
In the midst of it all, giant speakers and mixing desks arrived, and various musicians floated in and out, so that Waterhouse, by that point exclusively wearing a giant white muumuu from Madewell (when it came to pregnancy dressing, “I did not thrive,” she deadpans), could finish her album before, well, life as she knew it changed forever. But there’s nothing like a real deadline to get something done: her upcoming record, Memoir of a Sparklemuffin, was delivered in the first week of March; the baby two days later.
That was – I discover checking my diary – a mere 10 weeks before we meet on her photoshoot, taking place in the luscious garden of one of those quintessentially LA mid-century houses – all straight lines, endless panes of gleaming glass and astonishing views – perched high up in the serene quiet of Beverly Hills. My God, I think, the energy of this woman. Since having the baby, a daughter, she’s already filmed a music video for her single “Supersad” from Memoir, headlined the Gobi stage at Coachella, organised a summer tour and, as of this morning, when she was photographed with her baby nestled against the fringing of a Bottega Veneta coat, starred with her newborn on a Vogue cover.
“Stop – no comparisons!” she says, kindly but firmly, placing an arm on my shoulder between takes, when I express something akin to awe for the way she appears to be managing it all; I tell her that I was certainly not in a position (in the unlikely event it had presented itself) to leap about on a bouncy castle in front of a camera when I was a couple of months postpartum. But Waterhouse is freshly exposed to the perniciousness of new mum comparison, and fast learning that absolutely no good can come of it, for either side. “Every mum’s morality is in question so much, not just from yourself, but from society,” she says. “Everyone’s projecting something onto you. That’s an insane thing.” Take the criticism she came under online for playing Coachella six weeks after giving birth. “Like, honestly, of course [I was thinking]: ‘Holy shit, how is this going to work, is this even going to be possible?’” she says. But ultimately: “You just have to go, ‘This is what we’re doing, this is what we’re about and fuck what anyone else thinks.’”
Then she’s off again for more fashion, reappearing in due course in a “giant pink cloud of an Alaïa coat”, as she describes it, that Waterhouse west London voice still reassuringly plummy after almost a decade here on the West Coast; the trademark, dirty blonde fringe still constantly tickling her eyelashes. (“I can hear my mum saying, ‘Get your hair out of your face,’” she says, with an eyeroll.) Then comes a barely-there black lace Chloé number (“It’s the full Stevie,” she exclaims, referring to the Fleetwood Mac singer, bringing the billowing sleeves up to her head) followed by a mirror-flecked Louis Vuitton, slipped into just in time for it to dazzle in the sun that’s finally decided to make an appearance on this otherwise distinctly un-Californian grey day.
So much does Waterhouse look and move (and, crucially, sound, if you’ve listened to her music or seen her perform) like the platonic ideal of the frontwoman, that it’s a wonder that it’s only in the past two years that the former model and working actor has made music the focus of her career. After a decade or more of quietly (too quietly, perhaps) releasing tracks online, in May 2022 she put out her debut album, I Can’t Let Go – think melancholy, sun-bleached indie pop in the vein of Mazzy Star meets Sharon Van Etten, via the twee noughties vibe of Camera Obscura – on the label Sub Pop (most famous for first signing Nirvana). What took her so long to get here? “I definitely fell into a box and I really felt like I didn’t know if I was ever going to get out of it,” she says, referring to her “Model, Actress, Whatever” years, a description which provides the title to one of the many knowing tracks on the new album.
It was, in fact, landing the role of keyboardist Karen Sirko in the multi Emmy-nominated 2023 TV series Daisy Jones & The Six – a show about a fictional 1970s band – which proved a turning point. In preparation, the cast, including Riley Keough and Sam Claflin, had to master their instruments and rehearse as a group, which they did daily at Sound City, the same studio where Fleetwood Mac recorded Rumours. It gave Waterhouse the impetus to finally find the courage to give life as a musician a shot.
The first album came out the week after they wrapped filming and since then she has toured with Father John Misty and completed a headline tour of her own. On Memoir of a Sparklemuffin, all the hallmark Waterhouse hopeless romanticism is on display – see the soaring, roll-the-car-windows-down ballad “Gateway Drug”; or the throw-your-head-back, guitar-heavy “Big Love” (“It’s all I want/Big, big love”). But beyond love, there are themes of metamorphosis, of leaving a phase of life behind and starting a new one.
The album title, she recognises, is “absolutely ridiculous”. She dissolves into laughter describing the Sparklemuffin: a “very fuzzy, wildly colourful spider”, native to eastern Australia and the size of a grain of rice, which performs a “razzle dazzle” mating dance. If the male is unsuccessful in wooing the female, she eats him. What Waterhouse could relate to is that the arachnid “basically dances for its life”, she says. “It’s an interesting metaphor for being in the public eye – if they don’t like your dance, they will eviscerate you.”
Waterhouse should know. For a good chunk of the 2010s, alongside her fellow west London model pals Georgia May Jagger, friends since they were 11, and Cara Delevingne, Waterhouse was everywhere: front row at every major fashion show, a different red carpet nearly every night of the week. Looking back, she was one of the last of the old-fashioned It-girls, not scared to be a bit messy, to let it hang out a little, to make the most of the opportunities that come your way when you’re young and beautiful. “Didn’t you feel like there was an energy then that’s a little bit lost now?” she asks wistfully. “Everything’s become so clean. You would look at all of us and think, ‘Oh, they’re actually having fun.’”
“She was always such a fun person to go on adventures with,” Delevingne says of her “wild, wonderful and whimsical” friend. So too is she “an extremely hard worker and a creative at heart”, Delevingne continues. “She has also always been so free and doesn’t take herself too seriously. More people need to be like that.”
A life in the public eye was likely always going to be Waterhouse’s destiny. She was born “itching” to leave Chiswick, where she grew up the eldest of four – Waterhouse has two sisters and a brother – of a plastic surgeon father and cancer nurse mother. Her sister Immy, 30, an actor, most recently seen in Apple TV’s satin-soaked The Buccaneers, tells me they were “quite unruly” as children. “We laughed a lot together and were always putting on performances for anyone who’d watch,” she tells me. “Apart from a brief teenage phase – where her favourite shirt was branded with ‘I love my attitude problem’ – we’ve always got along. She gave me this introduction to mad other worlds and we’d have the best time. Still do.”
When Suki was scouted, at 16, by Next Management (in that most noughties of ways: “in Topshop or H&M”), she gladly dropped out of school to see where life as a model might take her. By 19, she was the face of M&S lingerie and went on to star in campaigns for the likes of Christopher Bailey’s Burberry. “It’s not an industry where everyone has their sensible cap on all the time,” she says in what might be the understatement of the year, but, “It was a brilliant thing to happen to me really young in a lot of ways.” Largely because, “It was a ticket to discovering a city. It blew my world wide open.” She loved days spent “hobbling around in giant heels with an A-Z – I’d never even been to Camden before.” Seriously? “I hadn’t! My parents never took me to Camden. I only ever saw Chiswick and Barnes and Richmond Park. That was it.”
Soon came a move to acting (film credits include 2014’s Love, Rosie; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in 2016; and Sam Levinson’s 2018 horror comedy Assassination Nation), via a turn as co-creator of the candy-coloured accessories brand Pop & Suki, with her best friend Poppy Jamie. (What happened there? “Long story,” she sighs. “We were 23 and didn’t know how to manage our shit, basically.” The week they had to sell the brand to another company, “Beyoncé wore our fucking bag,” she says. “It was devastating.”)
But it was her relationships with men older and more famous than her – musician Miles Kane, actor-director Diego Luna, but most notably Hollywood superstar Bradley Cooper, who was 38 to her 21 when they started dating in 2013 – that propelled her to the murky heights of tabloid fame. The relationship lasted two years and Waterhouse’s early, self-released songs (which have since found a proper home on her 2022 EP Milk Teeth) deal in the rawest of heartbreak. Take “Brutally”, recorded in 2016, an absolute gut-punch of a break-up song with an achingly mournful vocal (“It’s just the way it’s meant to be/Now your love’s no good for me”). “I was so scared to put that song out,” Suki told a fan in a TikTok video a couple of years ago. “And [feel] so sad when I’m singing it. So, so sad. I never thought I’d be OK again.”
Ten years on from the Cooper years, she is. But it didn’t happen overnight. “I really will say that I’m pretty strong at this point, but when something very public happens to you and the story behind it is dark and difficult, and you’re actually not doing well, and you can’t explain yourself to the world, that’s very isolating and disorientating,” she says. “It probably has taken a decade to work myself out and actually be able to have this expansion in my life.” If you told her then this is where she would be now: “I wouldn’t have believed you.”
Making music has always been her therapy; her way of making sense of some of the stranger situations she found herself in so young. “You can’t let go of things until you expose them to sunlight and they shrivel up and die,” she says of her motivation to write songs. Still, “A lot of it just doesn’t go away,” but, perhaps, that’s just life. “Do you feel like you’ve ever truly recovered?” she asks me of my own past heartbreaks. “I think it always stays in you.”
“Your 20s are pretty sadistic,” she says, of her past relationships. “The love I experienced [then] was only ever a fetishisation, and I think when you only get loved in that way, you only get punished.” The first record was an attempt to “purge” all that. “When you get into your 30s you’re almost instantly afforded a little bit more respect. It’s kind of delightful and shocking at the same time.”
Hindsight helps. She can look back on a series of experiences and relationships and understand, “I played a part in this; that was really unfair; this was really brutal – and you’re a lot more at peace with the whole story. Sometimes you’re going to get an unfair shot, but there’s usually some form of karmic retribution, which I’ve definitely found with certain people. You watch their narrative play out and you’re like, ‘Haha, now everyone else knows you’re shit.’”
Would she change any of it? “I wouldn’t take anything back,” she answers before I can finish the sentence. “All these chaotic ways that my life went, it was always material.” Even when things felt really tough, it’s “led me to a love that is really pure and a life now…” she pauses. “I wake up in the morning feeling really great. I’ll probably go down again at some point, that’s just how it works. But you wear your scars and if you can take them and build them into something and share them, then that’s the ultimate.”
The following day, at Waterhouse’s behest, we meet outside the curious sounding The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. Her publicist tells me it has a connection to the new album, but it transpires that Suki heard the actor Chris Pine talk about it on a podcast and is simply intrigued by his enthusiastic description of the museum’s “weird ephemera” and “rooftop Moroccan tearoom”.
She rounds the street corner in a pair of The Row combat boots, “the only trousers that still fit me from my old life”, a barely done up white shirt, oatmeal cardigan and a trench. She’s wearing another of her infectious grins as she walks towards me, half-drunk bottle of fizzy water in hand, and pulls me into a warm hug. (Later, I happen upon a comment, posted beneath an old Vogue video diary of hers on YouTube, that describes Suki as having “such golden retriever energy” and, I think, it’s not not accurate.)
Inside, weird ephemera is, indeed, one way of describing the exhibits on display. Deeply unusual would be another, or as one Google reviewer put it, “This place is either a thought experiment or a hilarious scam.” As we stroll around, bemused, in the semi-darkness, past (what is conveyed as) dead mice on toast and some haunted-looking children’s clothes, we admit to each other that neither of us has any clue what is going on. But Waterhouse is in her element. She is a self-confessed “weird Brit”, whose sense of humour undoubtedly veers towards the surreal: this is a woman who listens to Julia Davis’s potty-mouthed Dear Joan and Jericha podcast – the darkest of dark comedies – on loudspeaker in Ubers. Still, now, she rises early to call her friends back home (“My English friends give me oxygen,” she says) and the question of whether she and Pattinson will move back to London has definitely come up. “Trust me,” she says, “it’s at the forefront of our minds.”
That fish-out-of-water feeling was something she recognised in Pattinson when they first met – in the meet cute to end all meet cutes – six years ago, at a games night in LA (“one of the things people do here to congregate”, she explains when I stare at her blankly). “I was sure that I’d met him a long time ago, but he didn’t think that we had,” she says, in a way that suggests that particular disagreement remains unresolved as she settles into her seat in the tearoom. The game that night? Werewolf (think the The Traitors, and if you haven’t seen that, then wink murder). “It was very, very intense,” she says, eyebrows raised. “There were lots of ‘big’ characters, real heavy hitters.” Such as? She pauses. “Al Pacino was there. Javier and Penelope were there… and, you know, everyone was really acting.”
The pair made a beeline for each other – “I think we both sort of have the same slight uncomfortable-ness” – and quickly “started giggling at the absurdity of the whole thing”. So disruptive did they become that they “got told off. There was a director that separated us because we were laughing too much.”
Although numbers weren’t swapped, and it was “six or seven months” until they bumped into each other again, that night “had percolated [something]...” Huh, she thought, “I think Rob’s quite funny, I light up when I’m around him.” Living in LA, she says, “definitely became a lot more fun when I met him”.
And now, here they are, a family. I wonder, was finding out she was pregnant when the music was just starting to take shape a bit of a bombshell? “No, we really planned it,” she says sweetly, breaking into the hugest ear-to-ear smile. “One day we looked at each other and said, ‘Well, this is as ready as we’re going to be.’” And besides, Waterhouse loves to keep things interesting: “I was like, ‘What can make more chaos?’” she says, laughing.
Of course, she recognises the timing isn’t exactly ideal. She has a tour that the baby will need to come on (Waterhouse is currently canvassing all mum musicians she knows for tips) and “I definitely think, ‘Oh, I’m shooting the cover of Vogue and I’m 25 pounds heavier than I normally am right now,’ but it’s also like, ‘Who gives a fuck?’ It is what it is.” (And also? “The boobs are so fun.”)
Nesting aside, there was zero prep, no antenatal classes, just a ton of baby books she couldn’t stay awake long enough to read (“I really had no concept that there was a baby inside me,” she says. “Like, I knew that was the case, but I was like, ‘What do you mean? That’s insane.’”). “She approached pregnancy and motherhood the way she does to most things in life; with an almost confusing nonchalance and go-with-the-flow attitude,” says Immy. “And all of that calm has transferred to the baby – she’s a true chiller.”
Literally the only thing Waterhouse did prior was find out the gender. “I wish I hadn’t wanted to find out,” she says, “but I needed to prepare myself mentally.” The “instant” she discovered she was having a girl she called her “mum in floods of tears”. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, am I going to have to go through what [you] went through with me?’” What happened? “I was just such a little bitch,” she says, cringing. “[My mum] usually loves telling my terrible teenage stories, but she was like, ‘No, no, you were great. You were amazing, you were fine.’” Waterhouse has a whole new admiration for her mother now, phoning her constantly to tell her, “You are incredible and I don’t know how you had four kids under eight.”
“Shocking” is the one word she would use to describe early motherhood. “Shocking in every way.” She’s laughing, but I detect a note of harrowed disbelief – one I recognise from other new mothers, myself included. She looks me dead in the eyes as she recalls her realisation a baby needs to be breastfed “every two hours. I was alarmed in the hospital when they kept waking me up. I was like, ‘Excuse me? Is this what this entails?’” What got her through the birth was a rap playlist and Pattinson. “He was there with me and like all dads, he was really nervous,” she recalls, “but for someone who’s quite an anxious person, he’s been very calm.” He is “the dad I could have hoped for”, she says. Her eyes go wide and twinkly. “I mean a dad and his daughter? It’s an actual love story.”
I wonder, given Waterhouse sings so much about heartbreak, how Pattinson feels about some of her material. She tells me that her ex Kane, messaged her to say, “That new song ‘My Fun’ is boss,” when I ask if any former boyfriends have been in touch. Pattinson, has “a lot of humour about that kind of stuff”, she says. “He couldn’t really give a shit. He’s like, ‘No one’s better than me, so whatever.’”
Does it make it harder to write music now she’s in love? “I can get mad for my friends,” she says. Plus: “Rob can still get a shitty song. You can find things to be pissed about.” (Maybe, for example, the way he suggests, “I should do an EDM track,” she says, with a notable side eye. “He’s always got very strong opinions.”)
Largely, though, you get the overwhelming feeling that there aren’t many things she can find to be pissed about. She can even be philosophical about online trolls: “There’s this really strange magic in the binary of going online and reading that loads of people think you look really fucking ugly today,” she says, “and then also being able to go online and being able to read this beautiful analysis of a song and what it did for someone.”
Part of it, I suspect, is entering her 30s and realising she no longer “has the mental capacity to care” about any of all that extra noise. “Now I have this anchor,” she says. “And I’m so happy all the time to go home and see her little gummy smile.” If that first song Waterhouse put out, “Brutally”, is an ode to heartbreak, the last song on Memoir, “To Love”, is the most unabashed tribute to the joy and relief of finding The One: “And we talk of how lucky we got/As we watched old lovers we dodged/While the world’s falling apart/You make you so easy to love.”
“I had a very clear feeling of being like, ‘Oh, wow, Rob and I have been together six years and I’m still really into this,’” she says of writing it. “That’s never happened to me before, that’s like a crazy thing.” It’s a song about getting what she always wanted: “This love and having a family and having a little world”. It’s a song about knowing that, “Whatever happens, this is my dream.”
Memoir of a Sparklemuffin is out on 13 September
Hair: James Pecis. Make-up: Yadim. Nails: Eri Ishizu. Set design: Spencer Vrooman. Production: Connect The Dots. Digital artwork: Leverpost. Cover look: Embroidered tulle dress, Dior. Silk scarf, Charvet