Dafne Keen says she was offered cocaine at wrap parties when she was just 11 or 12 years old, an experience the former child star says turned her off drugs for good.
“I was getting offered coke at wrap parties,” Keen said. “Like tiny, like 11, 12.”
The actor, now 21, made the remarks on Michael Rosenbaum’s “Inside of You” podcast in an episode released this week. Keen was about 11 when she filmed “Logan,” the 2017 superhero film in which she played Laura, a fierce young mutant, opposite Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine.
Keen did not say which productions’ wrap parties she meant.
The admission came after Rosenbaum, the former “Smallville” star, said Keen did not strike him as someone who goes to clubs and gets wasted.
“No, not at all,” Keen said. “First of all, I don’t think I’ve ever been drunk enough even to have a hangover. I think I’m such a control freak with that.”
“Because also I think as a child actor I witnessed so much of that as a child that I just had no interest,” she said.
After describing the wrap party offers, she added: “So I saw what that was, so I was like, I don’t really have any interest in that.”
Rosenbaum, 54, said he “didn’t even know what cocaine was” until after college.
Keen said sobriety has not slowed down her social life. “I would say I’m a fun time, though,” she said. “I’ll go out, and I’ll stay out till 6, but sober. Just for the vibes. Just ’cause I like music and I like dancing.”
“I did used to lie as a teenager so that I wouldn’t get peer pressured,” she said. Keen recalled telling people she had already taken something when she was actually “dead sober,” calling herself “the goodest goody two shoes ever.”
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, no. I’m already so high,'” she said, adding that she had really been drinking a soda.
Keen had nothing but praise for Jackman, who she said looked out for her during the long “Logan” shoot.
“He made sure that no one was abusing my hours, that I was having fun on set, that I wasn’t aware of any tensions that would have been happening behind the scenes,” she said. “He was so incredibly protective.”
She called Jackman “the best onscreen dad” and said he gave her “a lot of really positive reinforcement and a lot of really good advice.”
Jackman was gearing up for “The Greatest Showman” at the time. Keen, a trained dancer and acrobat who loved musicals as a kid, said the two were “constantly dancing and singing” on set.
She also remembered Patrick Stewart warmly. “He’s such a professional, but he’s also, which I think not a lot of people know, he’s hilarious,” Keen said. “He was so nurturing and warm to me. And he’s so good with children.”
“They were all really good on that set at making me really feel like a grown-up and making me really feel like a respectable artist,” she said. “But at the same time, what was so brilliant about them was that they were still aware that I was a kid. So I was allowed to be a kid and goof around and be silly.”
Keen said she began auditioning for “Logan” at 10 and landed the role at 11, after about seven taped auditions. Her rival for the part was Millie Bobby Brown, whose series “Stranger Things” had not yet come out.
“It was me and Millie,” Keen said. The two girls chatted at their hotel before realizing they were up for the same role. “We got to the audition, and it was like, ‘Oh, oh, it’s you,'” she said. “I remember thinking, she’s going to book it. Like, there’s no way I’m booking it.”
The stakes felt enormous. “I remember going into that audition and being like, it’s going to break me if I don’t book this,” she said.
Keen, whose mother is Spanish and whose father is English, said the Spanish in her audition scenes had been loosely run through Google Translate. She said that at 11 she was “incredibly confident and bold,” so she told the filmmakers the Spanish was wrong and asked to improvise.
“And they were like, ‘Who the [expletive] are you?'” she said.
Director James Mangold liked her take. On set, she said, they handed her an English guide and told her, “Just say whatever you would say in Spanish.”
Her father broke the news while waking her for school in Madrid, climbing up to her bunk bed. “He goes, ‘I have some good news, and I have some bad news,'” Keen said. The good news was that she had booked the film, then known by its working title. The bad news? “That the other girl didn’t,” she said.
The success of “Logan” brought unwanted attention. Keen said it was “terrifying” when photographers began showing up at her small school in Madrid.
As a girl working in franchises dominated by male fans, including Marvel and “Star Wars,” she said she encountered “very creepy” men who sent letters, Bibles and music boxes to her home and followed her to school.
Still, she said, “I can’t really complain too much because I have met a lot of really amazing people who have also really loved the work.”
She leans on advice from her late grandmother. “A bad person is like someone with a drum in a waiting room,” Keen said. “They’re just really loud. But there’s another 30 people who are being perfectly quiet and respectful.”
“There might be one weirdo, but before that weirdo, I’ve met 90 lovely people who have come to just like chat and have a nice time,” she said of fan conventions. “So why would I negate the whole experience over one person being odd?”
Keen said she lives with anxiety and has been in therapy since she was 10. She described severe panic attacks on the set of “Whistle,” a horror film directed by Corin Hardy, while she was going through “a really tough time” in her personal life.
“I would be convinced that me having a panic attack was me actually having a heart attack and about to die,” she said. “I’m so kind of people pleasing that I would just keep the take going, thinking I was going to die.”
She credited castmate Sophie Nélisse, who she said “could clock me every time.” Nélisse would ask whether she was OK, offer to take her aside and hug her. “She’d be like, ‘You’re OK. Everything’s fine,'” Keen said.
The set had lighter moments too. On a day with 73 camera setups, Keen made it her mission to crack up Nick Frost, a childhood hero. She whispered to him, “I wonder if the next shot will be a colonoscopy,” and he burst out laughing.
More recently, Keen said she started EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, a therapy often used to treat trauma. “It’s completely changed my life, to be honest with you,” she said.
After years of talk therapy, she said, “I was kind of therapizing myself.” She added, “I just knew where everything was coming from. I just didn’t know how to fix it.” Rosenbaum said EMDR was “a miracle” for him, too.
When her mind won’t quiet down, Keen said she writes, meditates, runs, swims, or books a dance studio. “I think being in your body is important,” she said.
Keen started acting at 8. Her parents are both theater actors, and she said she grew up “incredibly broke.” She was anxious and bullied at school, and her mother suggested acting as an outlet.
Her first audition was “horrendous,” she said, but it hooked her. “I left, and I was like, that was horrible. I want to do it again.”
Her mother coached her through “Logan” and still reviews her audition tapes. Her parents divorced when she was about 16. “I’d been telling them to get divorced since I was 12,” Keen said, adding that she thinks the experience gave her “a good sense of humor.”
Her grandmother, who lived through the Spanish Civil War and a dictatorship, died in Keen’s bedroom around the time “Logan” came along. “She was like one of my best friends,” Keen said. She recalled her mother telling her, “I don’t know if I can feel her, but I can hear her in my life.”
Of playing Lyra in “His Dark Materials,” Keen said, “I really liked how kind of human and unlikable she was.” She added, “I think that if she was a man, everyone would be like, ‘He’s [expletive] sick.’ But because she was a girl, everyone was like, ‘She’s so bossy.'”
She returned as Laura in 2024’s “Deadpool & Wolverine” and said, “The people on that job were really lovely.”
Next, Keen is producing a film called “Driver” that is about to shoot. She also wants to direct. “That’s something I feel like I have to do,” she said. An earlier short film she wrote fell apart, she said, when a producer “stole all my money and disappeared.”
She said she is still working out how much of her life to share publicly. “I think my privacy and my life is kind of sacred,” she said.
Asked about her biggest fear, Keen did not hesitate.
“I’m really scared of not being loved,” she said. “And not just romantically.”
