Saura Lightfoot-Leon Is a Professional Chameleon
Jacket, skirt, Mugler. Earrings, Shay Jewelry.
Saura Lightfoot-Leon is not a professional dancer—she has, in fact, made a conscious effort not to become a professional dancer—but she knows she moves like one. She is the daughter of Paul Lightfoot and Sol León, both dancers and choreographers in the Netherlands, where she spent the bulk of her childhood in the theater. “They’re very outward, bravely performative people, and they express deeply,” Lightfoot-Leon says of the artists who raised her. “That’s something I’ve been told by fellow castmates: There’s an openness to me.”
By the time a teenage Lightfoot-Leon started considering her own aspirations, dance didn’t factor into the equation. “I saw so much of it, you have to understand,” she explains. “It felt like I’d already lived that life, in a way.” Like most teenagers, she wanted “to grow up and make myself independent,” and to operate in a circle “that didn’t feel part of my parents’ world.” When she was 14, an English teacher recognized Lightfoot-Leon’s emotional intelligence within her creative writing, and recommended she try acting. That suggestion spurred her to start researching where she might train, and when multiple people pointed her toward London, her father took her to West End performances on her birthday each year, until she was old enough to leave home.
Turtleneck, culottes, belt, boots, Saint Laurent. Earrings, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Soon enough, London became her stomping ground. After graduating with an acting degree from the capital’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2020, Lightfoot-Leon made her television debut in the BBC One series Life After Life, then scored a lead actress role in the 2023 film Hoard, for which she won a Special Jury Mention at the Venice International Film Festival and was later nominated for two British Independent Film Awards. Her breakthrough secured, she spent 2024 appearing in the Apple TV+ drama Masters of the Air, the Netflix western American Primeval, and the Paramount+ spy saga The Agency, which is now filming its second season.
Lightfoot-Leon, now 27, doesn’t spend as much time in hallowed dance studios as she once did. But neither is she as inclined to ignore dance’s impact in her life. She admits her instinct has been to “hide away something precious that actually influences everything I do,” in an attempt to forge her own distinct path. But “the moment I really started finding myself in the characters I was playing, the more I struggled to push away that side of me,” she says. “My past is me, and I don’t try to separate that from my work anymore. It lives within me. It gives me a richer body language.”
“My past is me, and I don’t try to separate that from my work anymore. It lives within me.”
On the set of Hoard, Lightfoot-Leon realized that though she might not want to spend her career in pointe shoes, she did want to spend it in the presence of a company. Acting alongside Joseph Quinn of Stranger Things and Hayley Squires of I, Daniel Blake, and being led by director Luna Carmoon, Lightfoot-Leon recognized a similar feeling: “an element of the ‘company’ feel that I continue to look for in my work.”
Acting in film and television doesn’t always allow her the time to develop the same type of intimate relationships often found in the theater, but Lightfoot-Leon says that The Agency has not only drawn her into a community, with talents like Michael Fassbender and Jeffrey Wright—it’s also blessed her with insight into her own mind. As the CIA field officer Danny Morata in the spy thriller series, Lightfoot-Leon plays “a professional chameleon, who’s learning how to access different parts of herself and choosing what she shows and when to show it.” The actress has no trouble drawing parallels to her own experience. “Where that line is drawn is not only part of a covert agent’s life, but also an actor’s life. It’s like, ‘Where does the me who’s acting in these scenes stop and the character begin?’ So that’s fascinating.” (She teases that season 2 will depict Danny “in a very different light. Season 1 was sowing the seeds. This season is a whole other beast, and it gets scary. She gets real. That’s all I’m going to say.”)
Turtleneck, culottes, belt, boots, Saint Laurent. Earrings, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Like any good artist with a background in movement, Lightfoot-Leon says she judges her potential projects based on the reactions a script evokes in her body. Does it make her laugh? Tense up? Daydream? If she’s “sucked in,” she’s sold. “Art is a language in itself,” she says. “It’s this feeling that’s not in my head; it’s somewhere in my heart, somewhere in my gut. It involves different parts of your brain and your body and your intuition, and it’s been carried across centuries and through different generations of people.
“What I feel it brings us is hope,” she concludes. “It reminds people of something that, maybe, they’ve forgotten.”
Hair by Sami Knight for Rehab; makeup by Alexandra French at Forward Artists; manicure by Jolene Brodeur at The Wall Group; produced by Anthony Federici at Petty Cash Production; photographed at Malibu Creek Ranch.
A version of this story appears in the Summer 2025 issue of ELLE.
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