SCARLETT CURTIS

Scarlett Curtis bursts on to the screen of my laptop in a flurry. Her hair is the same colour as the certified blue tick that accompanies her name on Instagram and, while I’ve followed its colour-evolution on social media, it’s considerably more electric on a big screen. Her face is expressive and makeup-less, she appears unaware of how charming her matching hair and eyes are as she reclines on a sofa somewhere in LA.

Despite her impressive heritage (father is acclaimed director, Richard Curtis, mother is writer, Emma Freud) she has defied the current millennial law of becoming a “star” on the coattails of your family’s notoriety. You won’t catch her doing the rounds on the party circuit; she made it clear in a piece she wrote for Elle, where she is Contributing Editor, that she doesn’t like clubs: “I hate them. They’re too loud. I don’t understand the dress code. Why do you have to pay to sit down at a table?” No, here is the twenty-two-year-old columnist, and activist, who is making a point of utilising her platform for the greater good.

The eldest of four born to her “insanely relaxed and non-pressuring” parents, Curtis called West London ‘home’ for the first part of her life. She speaks of a “happy” albeit “privileged” childhood, with a family she adores. And then, as she hit the pivotal years of teenage-dom, disaster struck. A spine operation at the age of fourteen went catastrophically wrong, leaving her confined to a wheelchair and in chronic pain for three years. She was forced to leave school and was swiftly diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety. “I wasn’t in school, I wasn’t doing any of the things that other people my age were doing, I felt so excluded, so insanely different from everyone,” she recalls.

​

“But it is nice to feel like other young people are going through the things you’re going through. It’s like actually we’re not alone in all of this”

​

While for many, being stripped of one’s mobility and ability to attend school would cripple any shred of confidence or self-esteem that may have once existed, for Curtis that doesn’t ring true. She found writing candidly a form of therapy, and, seamlessly developed a knack for embracing her vulnerability and channelling it as a strength.

​

“I really felt this pressure that I needed to be doing something if I wasn’t doing my academics. I was really driven and, obviously I got a lot of opportunities because of the family I’m in, but I really tried to write whenever I could.”

​

At fifteen she started writing for magazines (winning two awards for her writing along the way) and fours year later, landed the role of Contributing Editor at Elle. When Lorraine Candy, then-editor of Elle, moved to The Sunday Times Style in late 2016, Curtis relocated with her, “I started sending her a lot of examples of how I thought a column in the magazine could work, and she decided to give me a trial!”

​

And that brings us to now; a final-year student in Gallatin Individualised Study, International Development and Online Activism at New York University, she spends her time juggling studying, writing her aforementioned weekly column and supporting activists via the platform she founded, The Pink Protest. When asked why she moved from London to New York, she says, “I had been through a lot, five years by then, of really hard times in London, I needed to get to a different place. I knew I was never going to get better if I was still being surrounded by the places where I had all these memories.”