Carla Tous Told Me All About Her Paddington in Peru Premiere Look

You’re getting ready for a night out with your friends—what does that look like? I don’t think the word “chaotic” would be too far removed from the reality of the ritual. For me, this visual conjures up scenes of eyeshadow palettes left agape and balancing haphazardly around on narrow sink edges, half-sipped glasses of Prosecco dotted on every conceivable surface, totalling a ratio of three flutes to each person, and clothes strewn around the room as if they’ve been set flying into the air from a party popper. This, however, is not how Carla Tous prepares for an event.

When I speak with Tous, a Spanish actor whom 99% of the British population is about to become very familiar with, it’s the day after one of the biggest events of her career; the London premiere of her latest project, Paddington in Peru. She keeps her camera off out of necessity—she’s dashing between meetings—and, in doing so, it leaves me with some uncertainty about who it is I’m actually speaking with. It is Tous, of course, but my research tells me she is 23 years old; her answers, however, say something else. Her voice rings with a thoughtful calm, unhurried and self-assured—a quality that suggests she’s as meticulously prepared off-screen as she is on, something that isn’t often attributed to someone of her age. I know now that she’ll have approached the styling process for this, the premiere of one of the most anticipated films of the year, with the same consideration.

“I like to plan!,” affirms Tous, right on cue. “I thought I would be more nervous about last night [the premiere of Paddington in Peru]. I was so looking forward to it, and I felt more nervous like the weeks prior than I actually felt on the day. I kept telling myself, this is what I do in Spain—much bigger, as Paddington is massive—but I was comfortable as I felt I already knew what I was doing and had planned everything as much as we could.”

We joke that it’s always the way—whether you have 20 minutes or two hours, the final minutes before you need to leave seem to go at triple speed. “Yes! It was all calm until I started looking at the clock—when I saw that we had, like, half an hour left before we had to leave, that’s when the nerves kicked in! I kept saying, ‘We don’t have enough time’, and ‘I need more time’, but everything turned out amazing.” By everything, she means her look for the premiere, which she worked together with stylist, Holly White, and a talented glam squad to create.

Wardrobes are finite—the items we own are all we have to choose between—so imagine the daunting prospect of choosing an outfit when you have an endless stream of options at your disposal. Such is the task of getting ready for a red carpet event. Tous began working with White weeks ahead of the premiere, having initial conversations about colours and prints, accessories and, what she’d later tell me her main consideration—her hair. But what speaks to Tous’s professionalism is the courtesy given to her fellow Paddington cast mates when having these conversations. “We are a big cast, there’s 10 of us, so I wanted to make sure that the look we chose would make sense with everything else visually. I didn’t want to wear anything that wouldn’t work with their [her cast mates] dresses.”

“While we had been talking for so long via Zoom, I didn’t meet Holly until the day we were doing fittings—two days before the premiere! I live in Spain so it was the soonest we could meet, and I was worried we were leaving it too close but, again, we had been preparing for weeks. Preparation is key! Still, there’s always the concern you won’t feel good in anything, which you can’t predict.” Thankfully, Tous didn’t have to worry about a plan B.

“It’s funny, I know people say this about getting married but the dress that we ended up going for was the first dress that I put on. It was a gorgeous white dress and even looking at it I felt like a bride. I put it on and we were both of us, like, “It’s gonna be hard to do better than this”. In some ways, it’s tough to put that [dress] on first as it can make you close off to the idea of anything else. But everything else just wasn’t as nice on me as that first one. I did, however, have four options I was happy with, which we narrowed down to two. We decided to sleep on it but, obviously, the first thing I did that night was ask my friends, my team—everyone—what they preferred, and every single one said, ‘It’s got to be the white Jacquemus dress!’. It just felt right—we didn’t need to hem it or anything like that either. It felt like it was made for me. It was a sign.”

It’s clear that Tous values her inner circle above all else. Joining her from Spain and in the flat she was getting ready in was her best friend, her boyfriend, and her agents from home and the UK. “It was so nice to be with the same people I would be with back in Spain—that made it all feel a little bit more ‘normal’.” With so many people in the room, I was keen to learn what the energy was like in the lead-up to the screening. “It was packed but surprisingly chill,” she tells me. “I knew it would be a long day, so we drank coffee, burned incense and listened to Billie Eilish. Now, whenever I hear NDA, I’ll think of this incredible moment.”