Suki Waterhouse has it all. So why does she feel like a spider?

Suki Waterhouse is fashionably late. “Five or ten”, one of her team emails as I watch the black screen. Sadly, the interview will be audio only. Which I totally get, having spent many hours on an exhausting social media video trail documenting the daily affairs of the English Model, Actress, Whatever, to borrow one of her canny recent song titles.

Yes, she’s a singer-songwriter too; a gifted and prolific one. Second album Memoir of a Sparklemuffin yielded 18 songs in September and she’s since dropped two more. Dream Woman and On This Love are from the same shimmering well of “sad girl bops”, as she wryly describes her happy place. Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift are fans.

It’s OK, I tell her when she comes apologetically online. She must be the busiest woman in showbiz what with all those songs, fashion shoots, screen roles – around 25 so far, notably the ambitious bombshell keyboard player in Daisy Jones & the Six – and all that TikTok, YouTube and Insta content.

“You say busy, but I’ve been taking it easy the last week and having a little time just enjoying New York City in April,” she confesses – though even strolling with her husband Robert Pattinson, the Twilight and Batman actor and father to her one-year-old daughter, looks a bit like work from here.

Suki Waterhouse and Robert Pattinson at the Met Gala in 2023.Credit: NYT

“Suki Waterhouse Makes the Case for a New Summer Sneaker,” was Vogue’s takeaway from the inevitable ambush of pap snaps. “I just wish I’d chosen something else to wear,” she says with commendable grace. My joke about occupational hazards falls flat. So we talk about her music.

“I think I had this terror about ever forgetting my life or what had happened in it,” she says, jumping in the deep end. Writing songs “was the only place that I had to hold a mirror up to myself, or to make something outside of myself. I know that I’ll always be able to go back to these songs and it will remind me of who I was at a certain point.

“That’s kind of the root of where they all come from. It was a way to feel like everything wasn’t just make-believe.”

The veiled reference to 15-plus years in hair, make-up and fittings is hard to miss. The daughter of medical professionals, Waterhouse was “discovered” in her mid-teens in a London pub, one story goes, and slogged her way from Marks & Spencer lingerie to Burberry, Hilfiger, Wang and Balenciaga to covers of Vogue, Elle and Marie Claire and ethereal heights as a fashion influencer.

“Music,” by contrast, “is something that you create from nothing,” she says. “It’s kind of amazing. There’s no one else but yourself that’s in control of what you release, how it looks … in my situation, anyway, every decision is mine. I get to be the decider of what I put out.

“To have that kind of autonomy, and to have that place ... it’s an incredible feeling. [After] working in different things where that’s not really always the case, or you’re very much part of something else, this is something that I have full ownership of.”

Waterhouse dabbled in musical theatre and songwriting as a teenager before ditching school to sign with New York modelling agency Next Management. Also, “this sounds so embarrassing, but I think I went to something called Pop Star School every Wednesday”, she says with an audible squirm.

“We would learn how to hold microphones, get put in different bands and do a performance at the end of the year. I was dressed like Avril Lavigne: very low combat trousers and tank tops, with really bad acne, in an all-girl band. And it was so much fun.

“If I think back to being a child, I definitely did want to be on stage, and did want to live this life of a musician. But I just never expected that that would happen.”

A parallel career in acting would boost her confidence. Between 2012 and 2022, her resume of supporting roles ranged from middling romcom Love, Rosie to the schlock horror of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to the dystopian sci-fi bombast of Insurgent, Assassination Nation and James Franco’s ill-fated Future World.

Daisy Jones & the Six was the critical and commercial success that ironically sealed her resolve as a musician. Set in the Los Angeles rock scene of the 1970s, the gritty/glamorous 2023 series cast Waterhouse as Karen Sirko, the titular band’s most driven wannabe.

“This was her destiny, and she was going to be on stage,” Waterhouse says. “Immersing myself in her turned this light on in my head.”

From left, Sebastian Chacon, Will Harrison, Josh Whitehouse, Suki Waterhouse and Sam Claflin in Daisy Jones & the Six.Credit: Prime Video

In one of those behind-the-scenes trailers on YouTube, she reveals something of herself in describing Sirko’s motivation. “I imagine she has a mother who she doesn’t want to mimic ... and she’s trying to get far away from that.”

“I think I was quite a difficult teenager and I think my parents had really low expectations of me,” she reflects now. “They’d kind of given up … because I was, to be honest, a bit of a nightmare. I think we started from a pretty low point. But they’ve been gradually prouder and they’ve been pleasantly surprised as the years have gone on.”

Committing to music at last, Waterhouse’s status and resources naturally helped to open doors. Her debut album I Can’t Let Go was produced by Brad Cook, known for his work with Bon Iver and The War On Drugs, and released by prestige indie label Sub Pop.

Memoir of a Sparklemuffin – the title refers to the recently named Australian spider – expanded her pool of collaborators in modern pop industrial style, and her profile followed suit. “My delusions followed me, haunted me, honestly,” she sings in Model, Actress, Whatever. “All of my dreams came true.”

Another quote, this time from Karen Sirko on choosing to terminate her pregnancy to lead guitarist Graham Dunne in Daisy Jones: “I’m not quitting this band to raise a baby!” Different times, of course, and different circumstances but clearly Suki Waterhouse has chosen to have it all. Has anything had to give yet?

“Look, having a kid has completely changed my world,” she says. “Right now, I take her everywhere with me. I’m going on tour again this year, and she comes on the bus. She came on the bus for the last tour and she was like a little potato then ... But now she’s, like, running around, and I’m interested to see how that’s going to be, because it’s completely different. But it will be so fun!

Suki Waterhouse and baby bump at last year’s Emmy Awards.Credit: Variety via Getty Images

“Life changes. I’m sure in three, four years when she’s going to school, there’ll be another alteration. How it’s immediately changed is I try and stay in one place more than I did before, but I’m really lucky that I have an amazing crew, and I have great family, and I have a great village around me who are prepared to support me while I work.”

Going back to that Vogue headline about summer sneaker politics, what’s astounding is how much of life has been co-opted into the work portfolio for the modern “multi-hyphenate creative”, to quote Waterhouse’s latest media bio. After the baby and the day jobs have all been put to bed, is all that content just part of the modern showbiz skill set, or a regrettable add-on?

“I’m incredibly focused on making the best albums that I possibly can, and making the best music that I possibly can,” she demurs at first. “I mean, forget about content. You can’t go anywhere without an amazing album, without amazing music.”

That said, her countless TikTok and Insta check-ins and days-in-the-life for Elle and Vogue are “kind of a different sort of artform,” she says. “Whenever I feel frustrated by it, I do remind myself [to] see it like a blessing, that I have this whole other platform ...

“You know, I’m quite shy, and I don’t really like to address anything too personal … but if I ever do need to, I have this direct voice … I’ve actually found it quite freeing, in a way. When I started modelling at 14 or 15, there was no way of being able to make fun of yourself, or anything like that. You would never have that access point to be able to talk to people directly.

“People are so much more open and confident with talking about issues; issues inside of the industries and ... it’s kind of shocking to me. I think I’ll always be slightly frozen in that time where I started working, where you just kind of kept quiet. But I’ve slowly acclimated over the years to kind of enjoying it. It can be pretty fun.”

It looks it, especially when she parodies the glamour of her day job in videos like her latest, On This Love, the second to be shot and edited by her sisters (also models) Imogen and Madeleine. In her OMG video last year she was almost unrecognisable under grotesque wig and make-up: a token tilt, at least, at the conventional beauty ideals that still rule the top of the pop ladder.

“I’m thinking about that stuff all the time,” she says, “and it’s constantly around me as well. Being female in the industry, there’s things that you try and escape; those ideals that are put onto you, that are put onto all of us ...” the thought peters out as the interview clock counts down. The sparklemuffin, as any arachnologist knows, must dance or die.

“I suddenly felt very akin to this very fuzzy, razzle-dazzle dancing spider that has quite a self-destructive side,” Waterhouse told NPR last year. “Some of them can be semi-fatal or adorable. You don’t quite know what you’re getting.”

Yes, she reveals, a date with the colourful beast has been loosely arranged when she arrives in Australia at last next month. That’s if her Melbourne shows aren’t already crawling with them. “I’ll be very disappointed,” she says, “if most Australians don’t have a pet sparklemuffin.”

Suki Waterhouse’s Australian debut is exclusive to Melbourne’s Rising Festival; she plays the Athenaeum Theatre on June 6 and PICA (Port Melbourne Industrial Centre for the Arts) on June 7.