Bella Ramsey Opens Up About Isolation and Chaperone Rules During The Worst Witch

Bella Ramsey is drawing a direct line between their childhood experience on The Worst Witch and the summer camp camaraderie of their new film Sunny Dancer, in a new interview with the Irish Times. Ramsey, who plays cancer survivor Ivy in Sunny Dancer, told journalist Rebecca Nicholson that the film marked the first time since The Worst Witch that they got to act alongside a group of peers their own age, and the two experiences could not have felt more different. The Worst Witch originally aired on CBBC in the UK but became available to stream internationally on Netflix, which is how many US viewers first discovered Ramsey’s early performance as Mildred Hubble.

Ramsey was cast as Mildred Hubble in The Worst Witch at age 11 and spent 16 weeks away from home over the summer filming the series, an experience they described as isolating despite loving the work itself. Production rules kept parents from chaperoning on set, a decision Ramsey believes was meant to keep out pushy stage parents but that left them without the support they needed. They said they had never been away from home before, not even for a sleepover, and ended up housed in a hotel room alone at age 11, coming home only on weekends. As the show’s lead, Ramsey was also given responsibility beyond their years, placed in an interconnecting room with a younger castmate and asked to help look after her. Looking back, Ramsey said they did not feel too young for that responsibility at the time, though they view it differently now that they are older and see how small an 11 year old actually is.

Ramsey said the experience left them feeling older than their years and cemented a sense of being caught between two worlds, more comfortable around adults than around kids their own age, while their playful side read as immature to schoolmates. They connected that feeling to being neurodivergent, something they had long suspected and later received a formal diagnosis for while filming the first season of The Last of Us.

That contrast is what made Sunny Dancer feel like such a turning point. Working alongside a cast of actors close to their own age for the first time since The Worst Witch, Ramsey said they were nervous going in that they would end up on the outside again, worried the rest of the group would bond and leave them out. Instead, the shoot became one of the best experiences of their life. Ramsey said the cast fell into an easy, almost sibling-like dynamic on set, mirroring the summer camp friendships their characters form on screen, and that getting older has made connecting with peers their own age feel far more natural than it once did.

Sunny Dancer has already opened in UK and Irish cinemas, and as we previously reported here on Trevor Decker News, Quiver Distribution has acquired North American rights to the film and is planning a theatrical release, though no US release date has been announced yet. Ramsey is set to return to Vancouver later this summer to begin work on the third and final season of The Last of Us.