If you’re young and famous and beautiful, like Louis Partridge , social media can be a strange place. On the 21-year-old actor’s Instagram, admiring followers – nine million of them – convene daily across geographical space and time, finding community in throwing around declarations of love like flowers at his feet. Venture into the comments section and you’ll find an emoji-ridden stream of “louis i am in love with you”, “my husband”, “so pretty!” and countless references to “so american”, the giddy love song that Olivia Rodrigo’s fans are convinced she wrote about him.
The young couple aren’t secretive about their relationship, but in the era of the soft launch and the hard launch and incredibly observant fans, they can play it a little cool: it’s enough for people to hear Partridge laughing off-camera in a video of Rodrigo getting accosted by British weather on an open-topped double-decker bus, or to piece things together from their photos from Lisbon or Madrid on the European leg of the Guts tour . “I’m lucky that the majority of things I see on my social media are nice,” Partridge says, a little shyly. The problem tends to be that things veer a little too nice: “A little bit manic.
” Partridge has had a great summer. A “hot girl summer”, even, he says. He wrapped a film in Tuscany (“It might just be my favourite place in the world”); turned the golden age of 21; and discovered the pleasures of Frisbee.
In fact, if anything could further solidify his immediately apparent golden retriever energy – even more than his eagerness to go for a walk today in Battersea Park – it’s the reverential way he says, “I dunno what it is, but I love Frisbee. There’s something about it. Simple things.
” We rendezvous in the car park, Partridge in a baseball cap over his tousled, wavy hair, white T-shirt and cargo shorts, waving to me cheerily over the bonnet of his black VW Golf. “Clearly due for a wash,” he says nervously; someone has drawn a sad face in the dust on his brake light. We embark at pace on a route he knows by heart; he grew up in nearby Wandsworth, and still lives at home with his family 10 minutes down the road.
“I’ve pretty much lived in the same postcode all my life, and I love it,” he says, shepherding me down some side paths with a camp counsellor’s expertise, pebbles crunching satisfyingly underfoot. Although Partridge increasingly finds himself being pursued by paparazzi on outings, he still finds it impossible to think of himself as a “celebrity”. He cringes endearingly, like a kid having a full-body reaction to saying a yucky word.
“I guess living at home kind of helps: I’m hardly living the high life. You can sort of entertain it for a little bit, but I think it’s important to drop it as soon as possible,” he says. There is an optimistic warmth in the air.
Having first caught the world’s attention as the charming, clumsy Tewkesbury in Enola Holmes at the age of 16, Partridge has since ridden the wave into a stream of prestigious work that might stir many a young actor’s envy: jumping straight from the Netflix hit to working with the likes of Academy Award winners Danny Boyle (in the 2022 miniseries Pistol ) and Alfonso Cuarón (in the upcoming Disclaimer on Apple TV ). The speed of the transition from doe-eyed teen love interest to playing Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious was underscored by the fact that production had to hold off on all the sex and heroin stuff until Partridge himself turned 18. He was still doing his A-levels at the time.
“Isn’t that funny?” he says. “I guess they were avoiding some kind of lawsuit.” But the 180 into decidedly adult territory never felt like whiplash.
“I remember being immediately – and prematurely, even – conscious of the fact that in Enola , I’m playing something quite close to myself,” he says. (Boyish, wide-eyed, a little klutzy.) He recalls Enola ’s director, Harry Bradbeer, walking in on him in the toilets, minutes before his audition, frantically attempting to dry his underarm sweat with the hand-dryer: incredibly Tewkesbury behaviour.
“But because [ Enola ] was what got me recognition, I made a concerted effort to try and prove myself as something other than just a love interest in a Netflix thing,” he says. “Not to diss, because I love that world and everyone involved in it, but I was keen to, you know, do a bit of somethin’ else!” I sense that for Partridge, being at home with his own image also means never quite letting that image solidify, especially now that more people are watching. As we walk, passing so many Richard E Grant lookalikes that I feel a little more crazy each time, he points out where one tiny scene of The Death of Stalin was filmed (“Took me right out of it! I want my money back”), and pauses to marvel at a woman feeding parakeets with a handful of birdseed.
Simple things. “That’s what I can’t do about New York,” Partridge says. “There’s just not enough of this.
I’m someone who just needs a bit more chill .” The more people he meets, he says, the more he realises he doesn’t think a whole lot about the future. “I don’t have a plan that I’m working towards.
I don’t – to be quite honest – have great ambitions. I try as much as I can, but also a lot of it is unconscious. [I just] go with the flow a little bit.
” Doesn’t it make for better work, anyway, to be more wide-eyed than hungry; more eager for life experience than success? This jars slightly, perhaps, with the fact that Partridge is already working with some of the industry’s most revered directors and actors, most imminently playing a backpacking teenager in Disclaimer , which also stars Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville, and Sacha Baron Cohen. As luck would have it, Y tu mamá también , Cuarón’s 2001 masterpiece about two teenage boys who go on a road trip across Mexico with a beautiful older woman and learn about love, sex, and friendship along the way, is one of Partridge’s favourite films. “I saw a lot of myself in those two boys,” he says, smiling ruefully.
“To, in effect, be one of those boys in his new thing is unreal.” Adapted from the bestselling novel by Renée Knight, Disclaimer revolves around a celebrated journalist, Catherine (Cate Blanchett, with more than a few parallels to her acclaimed 2022 portrayal of conductor Lydia Tár ), who receives a novel by an unknown author. After realising that the book is about her life, she begins to spiral.
Partridge’s character Jonathan is key to unearthing the skeletons in Catherine’s closet, but the “iris shots” that bookend his scenes – the camera lens swirling dramatically open and closed on sun-drunk vignettes from a backpacking trip to Italy – remind us that we are seeing things from a subjective point of view. But whose? “By the way, they’ve been very restrictive on what I can and cannot say. I’ve been given a sheet of things by Apple,” Partridge warns, when I ask what drew him to the series.
“But I like things that play with perspective, and I like thrillers, though I’m loath to put it into a category. And obviously Cate Blanchett is fantastic.” For reasons of plot, he wasn’t able to spend as much time with Blanchett as he would’ve liked.
“I was hoping by some form of osmosis I would pick up on some of her expertise,” he says, laughing. “I enjoy watching experienced actors: they do it like a job. They don’t get themselves too wrapped up in it.
” The very first scene of Disclaimer is of Jonathan and his girlfriend having sex on a train. The rest of the series does not shy away from lust, nudity, power, and manipulation. Did he enjoy exploring that knife edge between desire and darkness? “Uhh, yes,” he says, slowly.
“It was really quite difficult work. Some of the set pieces” – I assume the extensive, melodramatically heightened scenes between him and co-star Leila George – “were pretty heavy, difficult, and long. Alfonso liked to do long takes, and he’s really focused on the minutiae.
At times [we had] conflicting ideas, and I’m not gonna hold my own against a living legend.” He laughs. “I was doing my job as an actor, serving the director’s vision.
But I felt like I had a little less control of the character than usual.” It was a long and tough shoot, but he says Cuarón made him feel at home: “He was really sweet: made a real fuss, invited me to dinners.” Cuarón (whose assistant picks up the phone with an “Oh, we love Louis”), tells me that Partridge came to the shoot with a clear idea of how to play Jonathan.
What the director found “really beautiful of him, and very brave”, was how Partridge went out of his comfort zone, especially regarding his performance of the character’s masculinity . “He understood that it was important to drop those shields. He has a masculinity that is really beautiful, but at the same time, he allows the cracks inside that,” Cuarón says.
“It was so much fun working with him. The most important thing in what we do is the process, and the process was joyful with him. Besides being super bright, he is incredibly generous and gentle with everybody around him – as an actor, that generosity comes through, because he allows himself to offer everything to the role.
” Tuning into Disclaimer , Partridge’s fans might feel a little pushed out of their comfort zones, too. After Enola Holmes dropped on Netflix in 2020, two million followers flocked to his Instagram profile in just a week, such was the adoration inspired by Tewkesbury’s boyish good looks and puppyish, damsel-in-distress charm. “I’m just chilling at home, playing football , and then I turn on my phone and there’s like, however many million people ready to see what you’re up to, and what you’re up to is sitting on your sofa,” he recalls, still disbelieving.
At the time, of course, he was stuck at home during lockdown: no red carpet, no premiere, dialling into Jimmy Kimmel via Zoom. But he preferred that sense of delayed gratification; he never wanted to feel he’d been handed the dream on a silver platter, and feared being given a false image. “You go, and people cheer, and you do the interviews, and people care about what you have to say,” he says, an unyielding humility in his refusal to believe this is true.
I’m reminded of what Danny Boyle said about him in 2022: “The world will spoil him. But he seems to understand the traps that lay hidden, awaiting him.” Though Partridge makes it sound completely normal that he gets stopped for photos several times a day, he continues to eye social media with distrust.
“It feels almost like a weird little trophy,” he says. “But the work is going back and getting better at it, not letting numbers take the place of genuine fulfilment. The really worthy stuff that isn’t fleeting, isn’t sensational, is the work.
.. but my God, [social media] is like a drug, it’s so easy to get caught up in it.
” Previously, when asked about how he deals with the chatter – particularly regarding his relationship – he said something enormously wise, about how when you know there’s a room of people talking about you, it’s important to choose not “to put your ear to the door”. Does he find that easy? “I think I might have heard that from Robert Pattinson . I didn’t realise they’d use that as the headline!” he says.
“I dunno if it is easy. It does make it easier having a good support system.” “Do you mind if I go in here?” he asks, darting into a café to grab a can of orange sparkling water.
It’s a favoured family spot. “My mum always needs a pee, and I’m sitting on that sofa holding the dog, while the dog tries to get into the toilet,” he says, pointing. Partridge is preternaturally grounded for someone who has had to spend his formative young adult years dealing with a pandemic and becoming famous.
It is reassuring that he has had time to be young. He gushes about the surprise party his girlfriend threw for his birthday, and tells me excitedly about a backpacking trip to Thailand in the middle of filming Disclaimer , during which he befriended a fisherman who taught him how to fish with a speargun. For five days, Partridge became his unofficial assistant, going out on his boat and serving drinks to customers.
The fisherman’s wife would cook what they’d caught in the evenings, and they’d have dinner together. They still keep in touch. Acting, for Patridge, seems like a conduit to discovering those kinds of experiences.
“I do really enjoy it, the showbiz and the red carpets. It’s not like you present your work, step back, and people enjoy it,” he says. “You’re selling it.
” Unusually, for an actor of his age, he shows no signs of discomfort with any of it. I ask if he ever worries that all this – Frisbee, walks in the park, that all-important sense of normalcy – might change. “Nooo.
Not too much,” he says, putting his knee up confidently on the park bench. We’ve stopped in a secluded little garden with a fountain. “Good date spot, come to think of it.
Let’s save that!” But he does wonder what would happen if he ever were to do a big superhero movie , or franchise IP. “I came close to doing something just like that. If I’m honest, I’m very glad I didn’t,” he says.
“So far I’ve been lucky not to be too tied; the only IP or franchise would be Enola , and I love that world. I’d do it again. That kind of thing suits me, but I never really watched things like Star Wars or Game of Thrones .
” Not the MCU either, I take it. “God, no. Maybe I just have no imagination, but I really struggle with things like that.
” After paying his dues as an extra for around four years – he proudly lists Call The Midwife ’s Christmas special, Paddington 2 , and Pan among his credits – Partridge has only recently started to feel like he’s truly expressing himself. Roles with a bit more to sink his teeth into, where he can come to set and drop that “safety net” of having a plan. “It’s difficult, and takes more courage.
But I tend to feel really, really brilliant after trying something,” he says. Though he usually struggles to watch himself back, it’s why he’s happy with his performance in Pistol . “And I don’t say that often.
” Why not? “Because I fear I’m playing it too safe, and I have an idea in my head of actors being people that have to transform,” he says, describing Christian Bale as “a nutter” with both humour and admiration. In Pistol , Partridge donned fake teeth, a Cockney accent, and went on a “crazy diet” to lose weight. He learned that it was about accessing just the right middle ground – physically and mentally – between self and character, instead of chasing some elusive method transformation.
“If anything, you’re exploring different parts of yourself through the role,” Partridge says. “I quite enjoy the idea of being able to step outside myself, but also remain in touch with some part of you that’s a kid, and wants to be heard.” Some acting advice he picked up in Tuscany from George Clooney – another legendary co-star Partridge ticks off his bucket list in Noah Baumbach’s next film – stuck with him.
(“Ha, ha, ha! I will name-drop,” he says gleefully). “You think you know everything when you start, and then you realise you know absolutely nothing,” Partridge paraphrases. I can see why it resonated with him as an actor wary of letting his reflection settle in the water: whose greatest worry is playing it too safe, who feels comfortable in his skin only when defying expectation in some way.
He puts it more plainly, though: “I guess it’s that constant not knowing whether you’re actually any good.” Even if you’re George Clooney. In his final year at school, Partridge decided to cast off the weight of expectation placed on him as a professional actor, and take part in the school play.
“I don’t think I was that good, and that’s really freeing in a way, ’cause I’m burdened in my mind with being perfect. What I’ve learned from acting and creativity in general, talking to musicians, is that 75 per cent of the time, you are not great at all. And it’s not about getting down on yourself when you’re not.
Especially in your early years, you’re trying on new hats, stretching your limbs,” Partridge says, with that camp counsellor enthusiasm again. “If there’s any time to make a fool of yourself, let it be when you’re younger. I quite like the idea of trying a few different things and just seeing what happens.
” As we walk back to his car, he tells me how in 2020, when he was 17 and it hadn’t quite sunk in how big of a deal it all was, he was recognised in public by a “very cool French lady”. “I was on a bus, wearing a hat and a mask, and I couldn’t believe that someone recognised me. She didn’t ask for a photo.
She just said, ‘Nice job, man.’” Did he respond in French? “I actually did! I remember being quite proud of myself,” he says, grinning. I would’ve frozen in that situation, I tell him.
“Oh God, I’m the opposite,” he says. “I will just bullshit until it makes sense.” Styled by Angelo Mitakos Tailoring by Faye Oakenfull Grooming by Brady Lea at Premier Hair & Make-up using "Shakeup Cosmetics" for skin and "Hair by Sam McKnight".
