Rose Williams covers the June issue of the British version of the famous magazine Who What Wear. The actress posed for the camera of Tom O’Neill and gave an interview to the magazine. You can find the whole photoshoot in our gallery and read the interview right below.

Who What Wear | Spirituality, Sanditon and Style—Rose Williams Is a Woman of Many Facets

“I think I was quite obnoxious,” says Rose Williams when I ask her about her early days of getting into the world of acting. It’s hard to imagine the person I encountered on the set of our exclusive cover shoot as anything close to obnoxious. On what was possibly the hottest day of the year, she was utterly charming, even while wearing latex opera gloves that required four staff members and at least 20 minutes of strategic pulling to get on. She was incredibly polite to everyone on set and visibly thrilled to be there. She was confident in front of the camera yet entirely prepared to take direction—the sign of a true professional. Then there’s the face! Oh, her face. She was wide-eyed and cherubic. If ever a person could be obnoxious and get away with it thanks to a “butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth” exterior, it’d be her. But the truth is the 28-year-old actress is calm, centered and wise beyond her years. Despite what she dubs a “gobby” start to her career, it became clear to me that Williams works hard consistently to grow, improve, connect and be grateful. One can instantly tell she is an old soul trapped in a young body, and there’s something innately spiritual about her. If you cut through the cheeky London accent and the fancy costumes we’re accustomed to seeing her in thanks to her starring role in the ITV period drama Sanditon, there’s a hippy close to the surface who should probably be in Sri Lanka, not South London. I could see her shrouded in something similar to the metallic crochet Ganni dress with peekaboo underwear that she’s wearing today, only with strings of beaded necklaces and perhaps a few more tattoos—but more on those later.

What Williams refers to when she references her “obnoxious” behaviour is her naïve and somewhat snap decision to simply just “be an actress.” Aged 17, Williams—who grew up in an incredibly creative household—was originally set on attending art school and potentially entering the fashion world. She dropped out of her A levels and secured a job that any fashion-conscious teenager would still dream of today: working on the shop floor of the legendary London boutique Dover Street Market. For the uninitiated, this is the epicentre of cool and the blueprint for modern luxury shopping. The inimitable staff are instantly recognisable in their black swathes of Comme des Garçons and Junya Watanabe, leaving a signature trail of Escentric Molecules fragrance behind them. “I think being at Dover Street shaped me massively. The old-school cats there are so special, are all very artistic, and they all are quite like magical unicorns. And being around that energy and people that did their own thing on the side of working at Dover Street was so inspiring,” she says. So perhaps it was no surprise that the in-house polymath mentality spilled over into Williams’s psyche quickly. When she took days off here and there to help her costume-designing mother on set and watch the action of show business unfold in front of her, she suddenly knew where she wanted to be.
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