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HAYLEY SQUIRES …IS UP FOR THE FIGHT.

I give myself a really hard time about the choices I’ve made and whether I’m working hard enough,’ Hayley Squires once told The Guardian. Averaging two films, a prestige TV series and a West End drama a year – and choosing to work with the likes of Ken Loach, Ben Wheatley, Peter Strickland and Ari Aster – she can probably afford to let herself off the hook.

The last 12 months have seen Squires star alongside Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston in Clio Barnard’s adaptation of The Essex Serpent, and with Joaquin Phoenix in Aster’s Beau Is Afraid. Then it was off to the Venice Film Festival with British period drama Hoard, with Joseph Quinn, and next up is a starring role in Steve McQueen’s World War Two home-front epic, Blitz.

‘This country has a class problem. It always has and it always will,’ she told The Big Issue, tired of being defined by her own working-class roots in a South London housing estate. Getting used to being a political spokesperson after her BAFTA-nominated role in Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, Squires spent most of 2016 talking about the cost-of-living crisis everywhere from Cannes to This Morning – with a scene of her breaking down in a food bank even helping to get the film mentioned in parliament.

‘I’m very, very proud of it,’ Squires later said. ‘It changed the way people think. It’s a prime example of why it’s important that our voices are heard.’

Even smarter choices followed, with roles in Strickland’s In Fabric and Wheatley’s In the Earth as well as a return to the award circuit for Lucy Kirkwood’s female-led porn exposé Adult Material. Offbeat indie comedies (The Electrical Life of Louis Wain), literary dramas (True Things, The Miniaturist) and more socially minded heavy-hitters (Maryland) continued to broaden her range, and McQueen’s Blitz is already looming large over 2024 as one of the year’s most highly anticipated films.

Look closely at the inside of Squires’ arm when she lifts her next award and you’ll see the tattoo she got just before getting the call for I, Daniel Blake. A quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it reads: ‘And though she be but little, she is fierce...’

HOARD DEBUTED AT THE VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ON 2 SEPTEMBER. BLITZ IS TBC.