If she had gotten better grades in school, Mimi Keene says, she’d now be a vet instead of an actress. The 26-year-old shares her home in Hertfordshire, England—just down the road from where she and her brother grew up—with three dachshunds, a Chihuahua, and a blue-point Siamese cat named Darling, who purrs loudly on Keene’s lap for the entirety of our conversation. Becoming an actress, Keene says, was “a happy mistake.”
Keene’s animal-loving, homebody nature (“I’m a creature of habit—I get very comfortable in my routine,” she says) might surprise viewers who know her as Ruby Matthews, the icy queen bee of Moordale Secondary School on Netflix’s Sex Education. The contrast between actress and character is even more stark in Keene’s latest role—she plays the mysterious femme fatale Kay Elliot in a new series adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Towards Zero, alongside co-star Anjelica Huston.
While Keene’s mother, aunts, and uncles were “more academic,” she had a knack for the arts at an early age, gaining a spot in her primary school’s “gifted-and-talented register for singing and dancing.” When it came time for the 10-year-old to apply to secondary schools, her teacher suggested that she look at local performing-arts schools. Keene spent the summer auditioning, and in the fall of 2009 she was accepted into the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, in Surrey, whose alumni include Olivia Hussey and Naomi Campbell.
Just one year later, Keene landed a lead role as the schoolyard bully named Janey in the Royal Court Theatre’s production of E.V. Crowe’s Kin. “It was a really cool experience,” she says, recalling hours spent between rehearsals jumping off the bunk-bed set with her young castmates.
Her success as a young performer continued when, in 2013, she appeared in the television shows Sadie J and Our Girl, before securing the role of Cindy Williams on the BBC soap opera EastEnders, which aired four new episodes each week. To avoid pigeonholing herself, she left the show in 2015. “When you’ve been playing one role for a while, you do have to take some time for people to see you outside of that,” she says. “Especially when you’ve been on the screen that many times a week.”
Keene struggled to find her next breakthrough role, however. She spent the following two years studying at a music college in Fulham and then in a veterinary program at City and Islington College, in Islington, London. “You’re holding lives in your hands,” says Keene. “It’s like being a doctor, but you’re learning [about] every species, not just one.”
Though Keene still watches Yorkshire Vet every day to get her fix, a call in 2018 from her agent changed the course of her career. She had booked Netflix’s Sex Education, starring Asa Butterfield, Gillian Anderson, and The White Lotus’s Aimee Lou Wood. Keene’s Chihuahua, Baby, even got some screen time, playing Ruby’s dog in several scenes. “[She] finally got all the fame she deserves, because she really is a star. She’s an icon,” says Keene, laughing.
From the very beginning of filming, Keene sensed Sex Education would be a hit (“You know when you’ve done something … quite special”), and she was right. The show, which released its fourth and final season in 2023, was “probably the best thing, career-wise, that’s happened to me,” she says.
A year after the final season aired, in 2024, Keene booked Towards Zero. Like Keene’s Sex Education character, whose popular-girl exterior concealed her true depths, Kay is much more than a pretty face. “She’s scrappy,” says Keene. “A lot of the time she’s felt like she’s been alone, so she has had no choice but to sort of be opportunistic.... She’s a little bit similar to Ruby in that way.”
“This is one of those jobs where I definitely had numerous experiences where other people’s professionalism and other people’s talent very much helped me to do my best job that I could,” Keene says. “With Matthew [Rhys] and Anjelica, that was definitely the case.”
Keene recalls one particularly emotional scene in which Rhys, ad-libbing, revealed the hidden tragedy of Kay’s character. “I actually feel like I’m welling up thinking about it,” she says. “He made me so much better in that scene. He was incredible. And that’s not an easy thing to do as an actor.”
Looking to the future, Keene says, “My dream is to look back on my C.V. and be like, ‘I did all the genres.’ Because I think that’s the joy of the job—it’s never boring, and there’s no limit to the amount of different, crazy things you can do.”
Towards Zero is available for streaming on BritBox
Paulina Prosnitz is a Junior Editor at Air Mail