Ella-Rae Smith

At fourteen, Ella-Rae Smith stood nearly six feet tall when an agent approached her in Paris. She had no intention of walking the runway, but fashion was the fast track out of Bristol and into the workings of a professional set. That phase was brief, because her real interest was in film, not in the covers of trend magazines.

And the change of direction was decisive.

In 2013, she shot her first short film under the title Kitty Litter. It was a small project that taught her that the film camera does not look for the static perfection of photography. Her real training, though, came from working on sets where the pace was frantic and there was no room for error.

Moving into Fantasy

The British industry often typecasts young actresses in period dramas with corsets and stilted dialogue. Ella-Rae Smith avoided that path when she joined the cast of Into the Badlands in 2018. Her character, Nix, demanded a level of physical performance that few actresses of her generation were willing to take on.

She performed nearly all of her fight scenes without stunt doubles.

That experience on the AMC series opened the doors to the major streaming platforms for her. In 2020, she played Daisy in The Stranger, one of Netflix's biggest bets that year. The series, based on the novel by Harlan Coben, drew massive viewership in the UK and Spain during the first months after its premiere.

But her career was not limited to commercial television.

In 2021, she starred in Seance, directed by Simon Barrett. This horror film was shot in extremely harsh weather conditions in Canada. Smith played Helina, and critics praised her ability to sustain tension in long takes with barely any dialogue.

Large-Scale Projects

In 2022, she appeared in The Lost Girls, a film that reimagines the Peter Pan story from a female perspective. In this movie she played Berry and shared scenes with veteran actresses such as Joely Richardson. The project aimed for a dreamlike aesthetic that depended entirely on the expressiveness of its leads.

By 2024, she had a steady presence in the industry with titles such as One Day and the film Apartment 7A. In this prequel to The Omen, she plays Annie Tarrant. The Paramount+ production relied on a complex production design to recreate New York in the late 1960s.

In 2025, her participation in the third season of The Devil’s Hour was announced.

Filming of the new episodes took place at Shepperton Studios in London with a crew of more than two hundred people.