Gugu Mbatha-Raw has a distinct way of finding her way into a character. It starts with a perfume. She hand-selects a fragrance for each of her characters and wears only that scent while filming. It’s a clever trick. With a quick spray of the scent, she’s immediately transported into that person. For Surface‘s Sophie Ellis, it’s Chloé’s Nomade Eau de Parfum. Described as a woody fragrance, its fresh, earthy notes are counterbalanced by sweet, fruity notes, providing interesting twists and turns. It’s a fitting choice for a woman who has lost all of her memories and must piece together the questionable events of her past clue by clue.
“I haven’t smelt it for months, and I sprayed it on the other day when I was doing press, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah.’ All these memories came back,” Mbatha-Raw tells Who What Wear via a Zoom call in February. “Especially when you’re dealing with somebody whose memory is a thing, scent and smell is so evocative. It goes straight into your brain in terms of those areas.”
The Chloé fragrance is an ingenious part of the English actor’s process of plugging back into her Surface character Sophie following a nearly two-and-a-half-year break between filming seasons one and two and a forced hiatus from the simultaneous writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023.
It’s not that she needed a ton of help in that department; Sophie is a character near and dear to Mbatha-Raw’s heart. The actress first received the pilot script for the show in 2020 while filming the Marvel series Loki, and it immediately caught her attention. The story was light-years away from the sort of kick-ass, villainous character she was currently playing—just what she was looking for. “It was really nice to be reading a leading role in a psychological thriller that was told from a woman’s perspective,” she tells us. Not to mention, Hello Sunshine, Reese Witherspoon’s production banner, was on board to produce. “I had an amazing experience with them on The Morning Show, so for me, knowing that they have such a female-driven ethos and having worked with Reese on that project and previously on A Wrinkle in Time, I knew the caliber of material was going to be interesting,” Mbatha-Raw says.
With no major studio attached at the time, an exciting opportunity presented itself to the actress to come on as an executive producer, a first for her. “That was my first-ever pitch in 2020—with Reese and Lauren Neustadter at Hello Sunshine and Veronica West, our showrunner—to be on a Zoom with the bosses at Apple pitching Surface. That was a big deal!” she says. Being a part of the genesis of a project and building the show, especially in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, was an empowering journey for Mbatha-Raw, one she would get to continue with the show’s second season.                       Season two, which premiered on Apple TV+ on February 21, follows Sophie (who now goes by Tess) to England, where she attempts to further unravel the secrets of her past. Finding herself entangled in elite British society, Sophie works to piece together the events of her childhood and her mother’s mysterious death.
