Ruby Ashbourne Serkis was born in London in 1998 to an acting family: her parents are Andy Serkis and Lorraine Ashbourne. She played Rosie in a 2015 BBC adaptation of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie and has also starred in The Serpent and Shardlake. She was named most promising newcomer at this year’s Critics’ Circle theatre awards, for her role in Indian Ink at the Hampstead theatre. Ashbourne Serkis will star alongside Ralph Fiennes in Grace Pervades at Theatre Royal Haymarket from 24 April to 11 July, and in the Apple TV show Star City next month.
Place
The Well Walk theatre, London NW3
This is just exquisite. It’s a bookshop and a cafe, and then downstairs they have the most beautiful puppet theatre. They do kids’ shows and some for adults, as well as puppet-making and stage-building workshops – it’s a thriving little community. They also screen Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin films with a live pianist. I took mum to see Sherlock Jr on Mother’s Day and we had the greatest time. It’s a really beautiful place and a little piece of magic. My family are absolutely obsessed with it.
Music
Ezra Collective
Ezra Collective are definitely the best live act I’ve ever seen. I saw them at Cross the Tracks festival last summer – I’m a big festival-goer. With Ezra Collective it’s all about their audience connection: they have a real capacity to whip everyone up in the most positive way. There’s a song I love called God Gave Me Feet for Dancing. It’s an absolute banger. I play it before I go on stage; it gets me into a good mood every time. There’s something about their music that really makes me move.
Book
The Courage to Be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi
It sounds like one of those fairly depressing self-help books, but it’s actually great. It’s a conversation between two Japanese guys, a student and a philosopher, and it’s all about stopping people-pleasing. It’s not your task to be liked by people, but the one thing that we need to hold on to and that will give us self worth is our contribution to others. There was one quote that I really loved: “Live like you’re dancing.” When you’re dancing, you’re not trying to get anywhere; it’s just about the act itself.
Film
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2026, dir. Baz Luhrmann)
I took my nan to see this. She’s obsessed with Elvis, but I didn’t know much about him – and what a brilliant musician he was. We saw it in the Imax and it was really immersive – my nan was fist-pumping. It’s basically him in concert at the start of a residency in Vegas. There’s an air of sadness about it but, unlike many films about Elvis, it doesn’t focus on his death and downfall. It’s all incredible remastered footage of him in rehearsals and on stage, and it’s really well made.
Theatre
Road at the Royal Exchange, Manchester
I have a really strong connection to the Royal Exchange: my mum and dad did loads of work there. Road is a series of monologues with Johnny Vegas as the emcee, and it was brilliant. It shines a light on impoverished working-class communities. You follow the cast over the course of a night as they go to pubs and talk about their lives and difficulties. There were some brilliant performances. The most moving was Tom Courtenay, who wasn’t even there; he was on a screen. The set was brilliant. It was really immersive and the writing was bold and funny.
App
AllTrails
My family are big into hiking. Dad has instilled in us a passion for walking and climbing mountains. I was in the Pyrenees recently, travelling around in a van, and someone recommended this app. It’s a nice community of hikers who work out trail routes and then post about them. It shows you where you’re going as you’re going, but not in an annoying way where you have to be glued to your phone the whole time. Then it tells you how many miles you’ve walked, which I find quite satisfying. If you’re as shit at directions as I am, it’s really liberating.
Photographs by Neil Mockford/WireImage, Hulton Archive/Getty Images, Joseph Okpako/WireImage