Nadia Parkes is sitting on the roof of a pub in Mayfair, speculating on life’s many strange synchronicities. You know: when you dream about someone for the first time in years and they text you the next day. That kind of stuff happens to Parkes a lot, personally and professionally. She doesn’t believe in destiny but nor does she believe in coincidence.
“I think we’ve got freedom but we’re all so…” She draws patterns in the air, grasping for words that won’t come.
“Use my hands to describe this!”
“Interlinked?” I suggest.
“Interlinked!” says Parkes triumphantly. “Interlinked, yeah.”
It’s Friday afternoon in August and life is good. In a few days Parkes will appear on the BBC in the true crime drama Kidnapped: The Chloe Ayling Story. She plays Ayling, the model whose 2017 kidnapping was the subject of lurid speculation after her release. This evening she’s off to watch the cricket; she knows nothing about cricket but it’s The Hundred so doesn’t really count. Right now she’s sipping a coffee in the sun, musing on her career to date and the extent of her control over it.
Here’s a good example. In 2022, Parkes had a lead role in the Netflix fantasy series The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself – “the longest title of all time” she quips. Despite positive reviews, the series was cancelled after one season. Parkes was devastated: she loved the story, loved the cast and crew, loved playing the witch Annalise.
“This is very actor-y of me,” she admits, “but I hadn’t yet said goodbye to my character. I hadn’t made peace with knowing that I wasn’t going to say her words or be her anymore.”
She considered taking a break from acting. Do some travelling, go and live on the top of a mountain or maybe a secluded beach hut. Exist. She felt too disillusioned with the industry to come back for more. “I’m a real feeler. When I feel something, I feel it quite extremely.” And what she felt after the cancellation was: “this is a moment where I want to tap out.”
Photography by Jemima Marriott | Styling by Abi White | Hair and makeup by Maireade Murph
This is someone who “wanted to be an actor before I knew what my name was” – she practically emerged from the womb doing jazz hands. There was no backup plan. She would be a successful actor or a struggling actor but she would never be anything else. To be contemplating a timeout in her mid-twenties gives you an idea of her disheartenment.
In a moment of drama, she even said aloud: “If one door closes and another one opens, show me how that’s real.” Someone was listening. Twenty four hours after learning of The Bastard Son’s cancellation, 24 hours to the literal minute, she was asked to do a self-tape for Kidnapped. A few weeks later and the job was hers. Fortunate timing? Undoubtedly. But she wasn’t offered the role outright. That Kidnapped door opened for multiple actresses and she was the person who made it through.
“Did you ever go to Smack?” asks Parkes soon after we sit down. Alas not. Has Parkes ever been to Moo? No, apparently she was more of a Smack girl. I never went to Moo either but not a day passes that I don’t think about the place. How can you not? It’s called Moo.
We aren’t suffering from sunstroke, nor is her coffee an Irish one. Moo and Smack are two of the foremost nightspots in Leamington Spa, the Warwickshire town where my grandma lived for nearly 40 years and Nadia Parkes grew up. Her family arrived there the long way round.
Her maternal great grandparents migrated from Italy to Glasgow and opened an ice cream shop. Ice cream remained the family business until her mother decided to become an optician. Nadia’s father is also an optician: her parents met at a conference. (You imagine there’s many a wandering eye at an optician conference.) The pair went for a drink – Parkes suspects her mum was the instigator – quickly fell in love and relocated to Leamington Spa. The town offered good business opportunities – presumably due to the high number of grandmothers who live there.
Her parents remain in Leamington. “Everytime I go back to visit, we end up doing a family pub crawl because there’s so many lovely places.” She also has family in Italy and stayed there earlier this summer, up in the Tuscan mountains. The country is part of her identity. “It’s one of those things where you are Italian by blood and nature. A lot of our family traditions are so Italian.” Can she speak Italian? “I can speak an appalling amount. It’s embarrassing.” I suspect her embarrassing would be my fluent but refrain from getting up Duolingo to find out.
Nadia isn’t the only creative Parkes woman: her sister Michaella is a writer, working on her first novel. (Check out her Substack here.) For Nadia, there was only acting. She successfully auditioned for Lamda with a monologue from the August Strindberg play Miss Julie. Earlier this year she made her professional stage debut in a modern adaptation of the play, The House Party by Laura Lomas, and picked up an award nomination for her performance. You see why she feels looked after by a greater power.
She secured an agent in her final year and a role in the historical drama The Spanish Princess after graduation. There was another historical drama, Domina, episodes of Doctor Who and Starstruck, one glorious season of The Bastard Son. Now there is Kidnapped, broadcast in August and available on iPlayer. The drama brings Ayling into the contemporary, from fantasy to reality – albeit a truly surreal reality.
In 2017, model Chloe Ayling was lured to Milan by a fake photoshoot. The 20-year-old was abducted, injected with ketamine, stuffed in a car boot and driven to a farmhouse near Turin.
Her kidnappers were brothers, Łukasz and Michał Herba, supposedly members of a criminal organisation called The Black Death Group. They demanded a ransom or else they would sell Ayling as a sex slave on the dark web. No ransom arrived but after six days, Łukasz released Ayling to the British consulate in Milan. He and his brother were arrested and she flew back to England.
Happy ending? Not quite. Sections of the media were sceptical of Ayling’s story. She seemed too composed in front of the cameras, not traumatised enough. Her outfits were too sexy. She was accused of faking the kidnapping to benefit her career. Piers Morgan called her a liar on Good Morning Britain. “Do we have an idea in our mind of this perfect victim?” says Parkes of the backlash. “Do we need people to cry to believe them?” The Italian courts believed Ayling, and sent the Herba brothers to jail.
Parkes is naturally Team Ayling (likewise). “What happened to her was so bizarre and extreme and unusual that I don’t think the general public were ever in a position to comment on the way that she carried herself.” She notes the stoicism that would later be seen as suspect, “her resilience and her tenacity”, likely helped Ayling survive an unimaginably traumatic ordeal. “She’s still here today because she didn’t kick and scream and try to flee.”
The pair met three times in total. Ayling visited the set and watched a scene through a monitor. Portraying a contemporary figure is difficult enough, and the task isn’t made any easier by the person standing a few feet away.
Still, Parkes finished the scene and received Ayling’s seal of approval. “It was a really lovely moment.If the real-life person is slightly shocked that you sound just like them, then you are probably on the right track.”
Parkes didn’t ask Ayling about the kidnapping itself. “I was more interested in what kind of music she listens to. I wanted to know how many sugars she had in her tea. All these tiny little character things that help inform who she is.” The approach paid off: reviews of her performance have been laudatory, with the Guardian praising her vocal delivery and iNews writing, “Nadia Parkes is stunning as Ayling, mimicking her deadpan, sometimes sullen demeanour with subtle expertise.”
Filming could be an intense experience, often emotionally draining. She developed an evening routine to decompress: don a favourite jumper, play music that reminded her of friends and family, spray some perfume, take a long hot bath or shower. Finding refuge in the familiar helped Parkes leave the day behind. She maintained a sense of perspective: “Anyone can shout cut at any point. Poor Chloe actually went through this.”
Shop the look: Jacket: Sandro | Top and shorts: The Frankie Shop | Shoes: Giuseppe Zanotti | Jewellery: Mejuri
Conversation turns to the future. There are upcoming projects which she can’t discuss. No problem – let’s talk long term. What does she want from the coming decades? “Big question,” grins Parkes. “I was actually thinking about this the other day. I have so many ambitions.” She’s written a short film that she plans to direct this year. She wants to do more theatre and indie features. Reinvent herself on stage and screen. “I would love to take on more transformation roles because that’s the kind of work that really, really excites me.”
Naturally, Nadia Parkes has a philosophical take on the future. She can only control it so much. “My main aim is that I achieve what I’m going to achieve, I do what I’m going to do. My career is going to be what it’s going to be. But I manage to do it all with a sense of peace and gratitude. That might be a bit deep for a nice chat on a rooftop in the sun but it’s not really about what I achieve, it’s about how I achieve it.”
“Comparison is the thief of joy.” The quote is attributed to Theodore Roosevelt but Nadia Parkes would certainly concur. “Comparison is such a killer for our industry,” she says a little ruefully. She stresses the need to ignore the achievements of others and focus on your own journey. How do you do that? “How do you do that? That is a good question.”
Her answer isn’t bad either. “You have to find fulfilment and you have to find joy. Acting brings me the most amount of joy I could ever think of. I am so obsessed with it and I’m so obsessed with film and filmmaking. But it’s finding joy from that first sip of coffee in the morning or a walk or a really nice dinner or silly conversations with your mates. Acting can feel like your whole being sometimes because it is such a consuming calling.”
She wears a ring on a chain around her neck. I can’t resist asking about its backstory. Rings worn on chains invariably possess backstories and this one is no different. So her partner is the musician James Smith. He recently released his debut album Common People; give it a listen, once you’ve watched Kidnapped and checked out Michaella’s Substack. Or consume them in a different order. Just not all at once.
Anyway, Nadia and James turned up to their first date wearing identical rings. By utter coincidence, they had each visited the same jewellery shop a few days earlier. So now Nadia wears hers. “To be honest, it’s around my neck on a chain because I think it looks nice. Not because I’m holding it close to my heart or anything. But it's a bit weird that story, isn’t it?”
Weird and wonderful. A perfect manifestation of the higher power guiding Nadia Parkes through work, life and love.
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