If they say youth is wasted on the young, they haven’t reckoned with Ever Anderson. At just 16, the Hollywood wunderkind has starred in a titular role in Disney’s blockbuster Peter Pan & Wendy, joined the Marvel cast as Scarlett Johansson’s younger self in Black Widow and smashed through fashion’s notoriously impenetrable inner circle as the new face of Celine.
On the cusp of superstardom, it’s safe to say she’s one busy girl – and jet-lagged, having flown in from her home in LA. But as she sits across from me in a hotel suite, hugging her knees and sipping a Diet Coke with a wide, toothy grin, her bright eyes and boundless energy don’t give her away.
She boasts an impressive pedigree, with Milla Jovovich, sci-fi screen queen and once the highest paid model in the world, for a mother and British film director Paul WS Anderson for a father. But while Jovovich once said she was ‘raised to be a movie star’ by her own actor mother, Galina, who enrolled her in acting classes aged 10, the same can’t be said for Anderson. ‘Mom didn’t want me to go into acting, especially as a kid,’ she says. ‘But I fought back for years because it always felt like it was my purpose and what I was meant to do in this world.’
She’s her mother’s double, sharing her enviable bone structure, bee-stung lips and piercing blue eyes. In fact, she made her feature film debut as a younger version of Jovovich’s cult character in 2016’s Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. But beauty and talent aside, she’s inherited a fierce work ethic and takes nothing for granted. ‘I realise having parents in this industry puts you in a privileged position because you have connections, which is something people work their whole lives to have, so I try to work extra hard to deserve the opportunities that come my way,’ she says, speaking with a wisdom beyond her years. ‘My family keeps me grounded. Mom was very careful about how she raised [me and my two younger sisters] because she didn’t want us to be spoilt brats,’ she says, adding, ‘she still regularly yells at me to clean my room.’
Anderson is a lot like any 16-year-old. She loves reading, drawing and video games, says she spends too much time on TikTok and plays the piano and guitar. But in the next sentence, she’s spilling the tea about what it’s like to work with Jude Law and you remember her reality is anything but ordinary. ‘He was so scary when he was playing Captain Hook but then, when he became Jude again, you couldn’t even tell it was the same person.’ She counts fellow Peter Pan star Yara Shahidi (Tinkerbell) as ‘like a big sister’, admits she’s always starstruck by Florence Pugh and jokes she would ‘probably pee my pants’ upon encountering her idols Meryl Streep or Frances McDormand.
But perhaps it’s no surprise she’s got a good head on her shoulders. After all, few know how to navigate newfound fame and puberty better than Jovovich, whose own modelling career was launched at the age of 12. Much of Anderson’s childhood was spent on set ‘hanging out in hair and make-up’. ‘I would copy her modelling poses and get my guncle to take pictures of me and try to steal the spotlight from her, as you do at six,’ she giggles. By age nine, Anderson had her first cover girl moment for Vogue Bambini, shot by the venerable Ellen von Unwerth.
Since then, she’s been photographed by industry titans Peter Lindbergh and Karl Lagerfeld (whom she recalls ‘gave me a little doll of him that I used to wash in the sink’), as well as Celine’s distinguished designer Hedi Slimane, who served as couturier and image maker at the French fashion house from 2018 until last week, when he announced his exit from the brand. As for her own style, she’s recently taken to raiding her mum’s closet after a rummage through storage boxes unearthed a goldmine from her ’90s modelling heyday. As Anderson puts it, ‘stuff that she got that she thought was vintage’. Jealous, us?
Despite young success, Anderson doesn’t allow her career to get in the way of her A- levels and has her sights set on university. ‘I’m thinking about business school,’ she says. She’s fluent in three languages – English, French and Russian – and is learning Japanese. She hopes to move to the UK next year and, if she weren’t acting, dreams of being an author ‘like Dorothy Parker’. She’s just finished reading Patrick Suskind’s cult classic Perfume and is about to make a start on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest – once she’s finished the Twilight series, that is.
So, what’s next for Hollywood’s brightest new star?‘ Well... I just wrote a screen play for a short film,’ she says, shyly. It’s a dark comedy satire she’ll act in, produce and direct. ‘If it goes well, we hope to shoot soon. If not, then at least I wrote something and I’m proud of myself for that.’ But right now, she’s got tickets to see Fawlty Towers in London’s West End with her dad, like any regular teenager. For tonight, at least.
Photos: James D Kelly, Getty