This Harry Potter Alum Is a Rising London Beauty Muse
Twenty-eight year-old London native Greta Bellamacina has just returned from Simone Rocha’s Fall 2018 show. It was a “bewitching” spectacle, she wrote on Instagram alongside a video of her twirling in a flouncy frock of the designer’s creation—and one that edged her “closer to magic.” Of course, it should come as no surprise that Bellamacina, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art who made her silver screen debut as a young Slytherin in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, feels a natural kinship with the designer. “Everything [Rocha] does has a theatrical edge to it,” she muses over the phone. “I just think fashion should be beautiful and take you away to somewhere else.”
Bellamacina certainly understands the power of art to transport. For her own part, she is on a mission to “revolutionize poetry.” After being shortlisted for the Young Poet Laureate of London in 2014, she founded the city’s New River Press publishing house with her husband, the artist Robert Montgomery, all while maintaining a career as a successful actress, filmmaker, and model. “I don’t have one approach to anything,” she laughs. Much the same could be said for her devil-may-care approach to makeup, which emphasizes her feelings over her fair features. “Sometimes I’ll be really playful and really go for it, and sometimes I won’t [wear anything],” Bellamacina notes. Preferring her own hand to a pro’s touch, she adds, “I think it’s a bit more interesting when things are undone and don’t look totally perfect and put together.” It’s a sentiment that translates to a soft-at-the-edges red pout, rich reflective moisturizer—never highlighter—slathered along cheekbones, or her “mark”: a trio of YSL shadows (rust red, espresso, and glimmering gold) swirled together and swiped across her lids.
“There’s a little bit of Camden Market in it,” she notes of the look that she often amplifies before any of her numerous performances (be it presenting her verses in the Musée du Louvre for Each x Other’s Spring 2018 show or taking to BBC World News to discuss her documentary about the rise and decline of the British public library). “I grew up in Camden, and when I was a teenager, there were so many youth subcultures—goth, punk, post-punk, indie—and they would all do their makeup differently…. There are no rules in London, and that’s what I love.”
Yes, the city fuels her creative fire, presenting her with a wealth of inspiration, stages aplenty, and a coterie of comrades and collaborators that includes Florence Welch, Shrimps’s Hannah Weiland, and playwright Tom Stoppard, but it’s also where she can find the rejuvenation needed to continue onward. Were it summer, she says, she’d unwind with a swim in the Hampstead Heath pond—a ritual February’s cool air will prevent her from taking part in at the moment. Nevertheless, a visit is still in the cards: “You go into the park and it feels stuck in a time warp,” she says of the area that Charles Dickens and William Blake once called home. “Being in the chaos of the city and then going back there, I really recommend it.” Fashion Week revelers, take note.
