Freya Allan watches. Cast at sixteen as a hunted princess in The Witcher and kept in mud and blood since, she makes stillness read as thought, and her franchises have used her face more than her voice. We would like to hear the voice.
Fi1m perspective
For a long stretch of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) Freya Allan does not speak. Wes Ball puts a human girl in the path of a young chimpanzee and his orangutan companion and gives her nothing to do but watch them, filthy and wary, from the edge of the frame. She does a great deal with a stare. In the film's slower passages, and it has many, her face was where we looked to find out how frightened we should be, and we found ourselves reading her before the apes. That is a compliment to her. The film could have used more of what she was doing.
She was sixteen when she was cast as Princess Cirilla of Cintra in The Witcher (2019), and the series has taken up most of her working life since. Ciri begins as a child on the run, hunted across seasons by Eamon Farren's Cahir, and grows into someone who can hold a sword and mean it; Allan trained for the fights, and she has described the set as her drama school. Our own view of the show is that it grew the map and lost the man, and Ciri's spreading storyline is part of what crowded Henry Cavill's Geralt off his horse. That is not her fault. She plays the part as written, and she plays it with the same wariness she brought to Mae, the look of someone who has already decided you cannot be trusted and is waiting to be proved right.
That watchfulness is her strength and it is also the risk. Casting directors have noticed the wide eyes and the survivor's flinch and have kept her dirty: Ciri, Mae, the lead in the horror film Baghead (2023), a supporting part in The Third Day (2020), the young version of the heroine in Gunpowder Milkshake (2021). She is good at it. She can be still in a busy frame and make the stillness read as thought rather than absence, which is harder than it looks when the thing opposite you is a chimpanzee built in a computer, and she did some of her own stunts to earn the mud. But in what we have seen so far nobody has asked her to hold a long conversation, to be funny, or to be wrong about something and know it.
She seems to have noticed this herself. Asked what she wanted after years of fantasy, she said: "I said I wanted something normal, you know, just people around a table having a chat." She got a planet of apes instead. Somebody should give her the table, a clean jumper and a scene in which nobody is hunting her, and then we will find out how much more there is. We suspect a good deal.
Biography
Freya Allan is an English actress. Born on 6 September 2001 in Oxford, Oxfordshire, she attended Headington School and later trained at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield and Arts University Bournemouth.
She is best known for playing Princess Cirilla of Cintra in the Netflix series The Witcher (2019–) and for her leading role as Mae, also credited as Nova, in the film Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024).
Her other screen credits include the film Gunpowder Milkshake (2021) as Young Sam, an episode of the series Into the Badlands (2018) as Young Minerva, and appearances in The Third Day (2020) and The War of the Worlds (2019).
