Robyn Cara was born in London but has made her name starring in dramas with distinctly more provincial and evocative names: Channel 4’s high school drama Ackley Bridge – where she played a student at a new merger academy school that unites the largely divided white and Asian community in a fictional Yorkshire mill town – and, lately, Bodkin, which premiered on May 9. In Bodkin, Cara stars alongside Will Forte and Siobhán Cullen, as a trio of podcasters investigating the dark machinery beneath the seemingly idyllic titular town in Ireland. Here, people seem to disappear during the town’s annual Samhain celebration, the festival marking the end of the lighter months and the beginning of the long, dark winter.

Bodkin stages the clash of two forms of storytelling: the podcaster’s requirement for cause and effect, and the deeper roots of folklore, oral history and myth. Cara’s experience working across narrative forms as disparate as comedy (Apple TV+’s Trying, 2020–2024), gothic horror (Joe Stephenson’s Doctor Jekyll, 2023 in which Cara appeared alongside Eddie Izzard) and, shortly, adventure (the forthcoming Land Of Legend) makes her the ideal guide through this world. Across these pages, make-up artist Kay Montano uses the latest CHANEL Beauty collections to transform Cara, wearing CHANEL Fine Jewellery, into an entirely new character – who draws power from her close attention to the stories we tell one another and ourselves, and why. ◉