Imogen Waterhouse, or Immy, as her friends and family call her, grew up in Chiswick, an affluent, leafy suburb in West London. Appropriately, the 31-year-old actress speaks with a genteel British accent—something that might surprise those who know her as Jinny St. George, the ambitious, new-money American girl in The Buccaneers, Apple TV+’s Gilded Age drama, which is currently in its second season.
Adapted from Edith Wharton’s final novel, unfinished at the time of her death, in 1937, the show follows a close-knit group of young, rich, and free-spirited American girls as they descend on 1870s London to find husbands among England’s titled, but impoverished, aristocracy. “It’s [about] these women who are free, and trying not to let the constraints of society corset them in,” Waterhouse tells me. The girls get drunk, run around barefoot, and have love affairs to a soundtrack of Chappell Roan and Lana Del Rey. “It’s a period drama, but it doesn’t feel dusty,” says Waterhouse. “You want to see girls unravel a bit in an era where they couldn’t.”
Raised by a well-known plastic surgeon and a cancer-care nurse, she once thought she might follow her parents into the medical profession. “I did used to love Grey’s Anatomy,” she says. But ultimately, she was more interested in the idea of playing a doctor than actually being one. “I never had the scientific brain,” she admits. “Drama class was the only place I felt a bit ahead.”
Acting had always been a part of her life. “I was a really hyperactive child,” she says. “I think drama gave me somewhere to channel that energy.” At home, she would put on plays for her parents, charging them a pound a head to watch. She conscripted her siblings—her elder sister, the model and singer Suki Waterhouse, who is married to Robert Pattinson, and the youngest, Madeleine and Charlie—into doing Nativity plays complete with musical numbers and gymnastics choreography. “I would make me and Suki be the camels, and the twins [Charlie and Madeleine] would ride on us.”
After attending Ibstock Place School, an elite private school in southwest London where she overlapped with the models Cara Delevingne and Georgia May Jagger, Waterhouse enrolled at ArtsEd, a performing-arts school in Chiswick run by Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose alumni include Julie Andrews and Lashana Lynch. After graduating, in 2012, Waterhouse continued her arts education at the Oxford School of Drama through a three-year acting program.
In 2014, while still at Oxford, Waterhouse signed with the modeling agency Next Management—the same agency that once managed Suki. She appeared in campaigns for brands such as Tommy Hilfiger and Urban Outfitters in 2014 and 2015, as well as on the March 2015 cover of Tatler. Still, drama remained her true passion. “I had this unshakable feeling that I had to give it a shot.”
After finishing her studies, she waitressed while auditioning for “slightly dodgy and bizarre” parts in “terrible short films I hope never resurface.” In the end, it paid off.
In 2015, Waterhouse got her foot in the door with a one-episode appearance in a BBC show called The Coroner. Roles in Tom Ford’s thriller Nocturnal Animals and the superhero show Stan Lee’s Lucky Man quickly followed.
Her big break came in 2018, when she earned her first starring role, in the psychological thriller Braid. That same year, she was cast as the main character, Princess Rosamund, in the CW fantasy The Outpost, staying on the series for three seasons.
Though an actress at heart, Waterhouse discovered directing while working on the set of The Outpost in Serbia. “It felt like a kind of boot camp,” she recalls of the three episodes she directed. Though intimidated at first, she soon caught the bug. “You have this bird’s-eye view of the whole machine,” she says. “And it’s fun to work in a way where you just have a little more control. There’s a kind of freedom in it that you maybe don’t get as an actor.”
She took the director’s chair again, earlier this year, for Suki’s singles “On This Love” and “Dream Woman.” “We always share opinions on stuff, so it just kind of made sense,” she says. “We can be brutally honest.... We really trust each other.”
Sisterhood is a major theme in The Buccaneers. In the first season, Waterhouse’s character quickly lands a marriage with Lord James Seadown (played by Barney Fishwick). The relationship soon curdles into something monstrous, leading Jinny’s sister, Nan (played by Kristine Froseth), and the rest of the girls to concoct a daring plot to rescue her in the season finale. “Nan really makes such a sacrifice for her,” Waterhouse says.
In the second season, thanks to Nan’s sacrifice, Jinny escapes from Seadown’s abusive grasp and flees to Italy with her newborn child.
Having sisters herself, Waterhouse understood that part of the show well. “It makes you get it. Because, yeah, I’d do that for my sister.”
New episodes of Season Two of The Buccaneers will be released weekly until August 6
Paulina Prosnitz is a Junior Editor at air mail
