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It was clear from a young age that her parents—a nurse and a plastic surgeon—had a real situation on their hands. The eldest of four children, Waterhouse describes herself with a laugh as “an incredibly angry teenager. When I think about my mom and what I put her through in my early teens, I cringe and I squirm. I was like this caged animal that was quite uncontrollable.” And so Waterhouse started going out and found her place within London’s nightlife scene. “I was really young, like, really young. Before I even got signed as a model, people used to think that I probably was one. That was when I was like 14, 15, really still at school and just telling everyone that I was 18.”

Still, she credits her wild-child years with giving her a lust for life that launched her to It Girl status, as officially conferred by The New York Times in 2013. “It’s cool to have that experience in your life of being called an It Girl. I’ll live with it,” she says. But there also seems to be some lingering regret regarding that era. “It definitely has weird repercussions. It sticks with you,” she says. Now 31 years old, Waterhouse jokes, “I think I have [fallen out of It-Girldom].” Besides, “I don’t think an It Girl can really exist anymore. It’s just different now. I don’t see as much of a community that can have that kind of hedonistic abandon.”

After being scouted at 16, Waterhouse became a staple of the 2010s modeling scene, shooting covers for every magazine imaginable, walking the runway for numerous high-end brands, and becoming the face of Burberry and Laura Mercier along the way. Her eternally, effortlessly tousled blonde hair with bangs always partially obscuring big, doe eyes became her signature. Her look balanced out the boho, indie sleaze aesthetic of the moment with an authentic DGAF tomboy cool. In testament to her It Girl status, at the same time that her fashion career was starting to take off, Waterhouse also successfully pivoted to acting, landing memorable roles in films like Love, Rosie, the Divergent series, and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. But the road to taking herself seriously as a musical artist, she explains, was not quite as straightforward.

Despite always hanging around musicians and dating a few in her teens, Waterhouse says it never occurred to her she could do it as well. That is, until she recorded her first songs with “a local weed dealer” when she was 18. At 21, a chance encounter at a nightclub took her to Montréal, where she worked with a chef moonlighting as a music producer, and she spent Christmas on a ranch in Texas, building fires and making music with acclaimed producer Dave Sitek, of the band TV on the Radio. But despite all those positive experiences, feeling confident enough to put together her own album still “always felt very distant,” she says. “But, at some point, it became a voice in my head that was like, ‘You are going to die unhappy if you don’t make this record.’”

Even so, it took Waterhouse landing yet another acting gig, this time as Karen Sirko in Amazon’s Daisy Jones & the Six, to finally feel emboldened enough to record her first album, I Can’t Let Go, released in April 2022. In preparation to play a fake band on TV, the actors first had to learn how to become a band in real life, which meant daily rehearsals at Sound City, the famed Los Angeles recording studio where Fleetwood Mac met. “I think being in that environment every day made me a little jealous,” she recalls. “I felt like I was just walking around with this whole history of music and all these songs and I think that frustration with not having them out got to me. Playing a woman who is so fearless and committed, such an incredible musician, you start to become that person.”

Embodying the character of Sirko allowed Waterhouse to examine her own relationship to music in a fresh light. She explains that when taking on a new role, “You look at what qualities you have of that person and the ones that you don’t. And I looked at myself and I was like, ‘You’re scared. You’re scared to fail.’ Because of traumatizing moments I’d had in my 20s, I had to convince myself that maybe [failure] was a narrative that was mostly in my own mind. I finally decided to just take the risk.”

And so, after years of tentatively dropping moody, earworm singles like “Brutally” and the viral TikTok sensation “Good Looking,” her debut album I Can’t Let Go finally came to fruition. A record that for Waterhouse was born “out of the rollercoaster of girlhood and being in a lot of heightened, unusual situations. And also being very alone for a lot of it…I think in [modeling], especially when you’re very young, there’s a heavy amount of dissociation. Writing was always what brought me back into my body and was also this thing that I could do that was quiet and introspective in the midst of mania. The mania that I was also creating around myself.”

And even though she raged against her mother’s rules at the time, Waterhouse admits that there was “this sort of relief in being told no,” in getting to be a child again. She also credits that maternal guidance with helping her maintain a more healthy balance in her adult life. “Now, I see everything as sacrifice and boundaries—constraining yourself against wanting everything, against that impulse to spend everything, buy everything, indulge in everything. I definitely see that as a way into much more happiness.” That happiness seems to have seeped its way into Waterhouse’s new music as well. Having released the EP Milk Teeth in November of last year, she’s currently working on her sophomore record, both of which she’s described as happy music about being in love after spending the last seven years writing sad-girl songs. But she cautions that her new music is not going to be all rainbows and sunshine. “I mean, I’d like to think that that’s true, but when I’m reviewing what the next album is going to be, I think there’s still a healthy amount of conflict in there,” she confesses.

Perhaps that’s because Waterhouse views the process of music making itself as a “battle.” She clarifies, “With music, the thing that I struggle with the most is the fear. I have to go sit down and be prepared to write something that is shit, basically. It’s an endless frustration. I find it quite hard to express exactly what’s in my mind.” Through this process of trial and error, however, she’s also learned how to recognize when she’s hit on something special, waiting for that moment when the music evokes a physical response within herself that she feels confident “will resonate with someone else.”

For her longtime friend Taylor Swift, it’s precisely that ability to so perfectly reflect the complexity of her inner life in her work that makes Waterhouse’s songs as effortlessly captivating as she is. “Suki has always seemed like she stepped out of a time machine. Her music is so raw and hopelessly romantic because that’s how she moves through the world,” Swift says. “When we hang out, I often come away wondering how someone can be simultaneously spontaneous and free—and also preternaturally wise. She is the wildest person I know who I would also trust to keep any secret. You’ll be stressed about something trivial, she’ll just look at you, cigarette in hand, and say ‘Babe, you know none of this actually matters.’ And she’ll be exactly right.”

Although the singer has gained a substantial amount of confidence in her unique sound and happens to have one of the biggest pop stars in the world on speed dial, Waterhouse admits, “The music industry is really brutal. From the year and a half that I’ve really been in it, I understand how everyone completely loses their mind.” When I point out that she’s a veteran model and actress—two industries infamous for being deeply destabilizing—Waterhouse replies through laughter, “Everything will make you crazy. But I think with music, it’s the thing of putting on shows, as well. With modeling or acting, you bring yourself and everyone else takes care of everything else. With music, suddenly I’m responsible for a lot of people and we have to actually put on a show. It’s just so much more all-encompassing in that way. It’s completely changed my world.”

Starring in Daisy Jones & the Six has also changed Waterhouse’s world, causing her to meditate more deeply on misogyny and the sacrifices she’s had to make in her own life in order to achieve all her goals. In the show, her character Sirko becomes pregnant and must make the incredibly difficult choice between keeping the baby and starting a family versus realizing her dream of becoming a rock god. “Men never have to decide to take that step back,” Waterhouse points out. “You can be problematically involved with what you’re doing, so engrossed and engaged. There’s never that moment where they think, ‘I’m going to have to step back or slow down,’ even if they have children or a family. And I think for women, if you want to have a family, if you want to have children, we don’t have that option. We have to give something up. That’s something that you can’t really escape being a woman. It’s never going to be fair. It sucks.” It’s also something she’s been thinking more about herself as a woman in her 30s constantly receiving unsolicited advice about freezing her eggs and throwing herself into her career, or just having a baby and trying to do it all. “You can’t work the way that you are expected to work. You have to be a boss,” she says of the double standards of motherhood. “You have to keep going. You just can’t fucking win.”

But slowly, the singer was able to find her authentic voice on those platforms, and with it a newfound sense of freedom to be as goofy as she wants to be. “I actually have found a lot more joy and a sense of self. TikTok felt like a new start, like a fresh place. It’s just so much more humorous. This social media liberation manifests in TikTok videos such as a “Get Ready Without Me” in which she leaves the phone in an empty room before reappearing in her final look for the Fendi runway show, or footage of her posing up a storm on the Vanity Fair Oscars party red carpet under the caption, “Me when someone asks me if I’ve seen their Juul.” And who could forget her instantly viral album promo where she simply held up a vinyl copy of Milk Teeth, writing on top of the video, “RIP Sylvia Plath, you would’ve loved my EP.” Her Twitter presence also speaks to a deep knowledge of internet lore, whether it’s joking that a grainy shot of her and Swift backstage during her Eras tour was “taken on a Nintendo DS” or photoshopping a picture of herself at the 2014 Met Gala into a meme of Karlie Kloss from the 2019 “camp” Met Gala, tweeting, “looking slay right in the eye.”

But Waterhouse makes it clear that social media is still very much a job. One we’re all in service to, she notes, whether you like it or not. “Everyone has this fucking battle with their relationship to social media and how they’re gonna do it and what kind of fucking things do you post. You get these psycho ideas where you’re like, everything needs to be color schemed. It’s just so exhausting and ridiculous. It’s baked into our reality, it’s like an extra arm.”

It’s also a particularly fraught job for a star as private as Waterhouse. Despite being very much in the public eye, the musician has always been careful to keep certain aspects of her life—like her five-year relationship with actor Robert Pattinson—very much to herself. “Sometimes I feel exhausted looking at other famous people’s [content]. I find it quite disturbing, like when people cry on camera and stuff… I definitely shy away from anything too earnest,” she says of her personal social media policy. Because when you wade into overly serious territory, she warns, far too often you end up mistaking your fans for your friends, or worse, your therapist. “I don’t think people really want to hear your shit or like, the really hard day [you had],” Waterhouse says. “It’s very exhausting to try and empathize that much with everybody when you don’t have the full context.”

And spaces like Twitter and TikTok certainly aren’t built for providing people with context. “I definitely think [you need] some discernment with how much heaviness you want to put on people or how much you expect them to understand. I just want to give people a positive experience. And what really matters at the end of the day, where I’m gonna put my shit and tell you what I want to tell you, is in my music.” That said, Waterhouse knows that she could still very easily fall victim to the siren song of the overshare: “I’m going to touch wood because I’m probably going to end up losing my mind in the next year or two and be like, ‘I can’t go on stage!’” unleashing a volley of fake sobs.

Perhaps Waterhouse’s innate understanding of how to navigate life on the interweb comes from spending a “sick” amount of time on it growing up. She claims that between the ages of roughly nine to 13 only a handful of photos of her exist, all of them depicting her stationed behind the family computer. “I had such a deeply sick relationship to The Sims when I was younger, like I’m quite shocked,” she reveals. “I had very deep romantic feelings for a lot of [the sims] and would make them breed. It’s very weird to think back on. I’m like, why was I so obsessed with seeing this man have eight children and killing the mother every time and then getting a different woman. I’ve talked to my dad about it. I’m like, ‘I think this is because you didn’t really hang out with me enough and you were always at work.’”

While she’s since given up the digital life simulator in favor of real-world pursuits, The Sims did inspire a song on her forthcoming album. “It was actually based off this letter I found that I’d written a boy when I must have been 11 or 12. It was this boy that I didn’t know that well, he went to a different school. But I would write about The Sims and, you know, what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Like, I was going to be an actress and all those kinds of things,” she says. “I was making up things, like, ‘I think I’m gonna go to LA in summer.’ Just crazy fiction. So the song ended up being called ‘Model Actress Forever,’ and it came from this letter where I’d written the word ‘M.A.W.’ [an acronym for ‘model, actress, whatever’]. I saw it and I was so horrified. But it also was kind of weird because I was like, ‘You were thinking about this stuff when you were 11,’ like, how strange.”

It might seem strange to Waterhouse, but something about that particular line in this prepubescent piece of snail mail filled with grandiose fabrications also feels kismet. Like the decade-spanning, multihyphenate career she’s built for herself was already written in the stars. The jump from one career to the next not a sign of flightiness or indecision, but rather testament to the complex, interdisciplinary passions that have been present within her since childhood. Waterhouse has been fully committed to the bit in all its unpredictable twists and turns from the moment she first pretended to have eyesight so poor she fooled the optometrist. A model, actress, whatever forever.

Emily Kirkpatrick is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn and the mastermind behind I <3 Mess.