Tuppence Middleton has revealed that her greatest fear is “endless vomiting” — a phobia that has been a defining part of her life since childhood and is inextricably linked to the obsessive-compulsive disorder she has lived with since the age of 11.
The 39-year-old actor, who trained at ArtsEd in London before breaking into film and television, described the anxiety as “a huge part of my OCD”. Her emetophobia — the intense fear of vomiting — has shaped not only her personal habits but also her professional life, driving a preoccupation with cleanliness, contamination and the potential for illness in those around her.
From Bristol to the National Theatre
Born in Bristol and raised in Clevedon, Somerset, Middleton attended Bristol Grammar School, where she took lead roles in school productions, and later studied at the Stagecoach performing arts school in Portishead before completing a degree at the Arts Educational School in Chiswick. Her first name, Tuppence, began as a childhood nickname her grandmother gave to her mother.
Her acting career started with appearances in the British horror film Tormented (2009) and television guest roles in Bones (2008), New Tricks (2010), Friday Night Dinner (2011) and Lewis (2013). A breakthrough came in 2014 with a supporting role in the Oscar-winning historical drama The Imitation Game, alongside Benedict Cumberbatch. She later starred as Riley “Blue” Gunnarsdóttir in the Netflix series Sense8 (2015–2018) and as Princess Hélène Kuragina in the BBC’s War & Peace (2016), a performance the show’s writer Andrew Davies described as making her “the naughtiest woman on TV at the moment”.
Further film credits include Jupiter Ascending (2015), The Current War (2017), David Fincher’s Mank (2020), and both Downton Abbey films (2019 and 2022). On television she has appeared in Dickensian (2015–2016), Black Mirror (2013), the ITV drama Our House (2022) and the recent series The Forsytes (2025). She is also set to appear in the next series of the acclaimed espionage thriller Slow Horses. On stage, she played Elizabeth Taylor in The Motive and the Cue at the National Theatre, opposite Johnny Flynn as Richard Burton and Mark Gatiss as John Gielgud.
Living with OCD and Emetophobia
Middleton has lived with OCD since she was 11 or 12, and has become increasingly open about her experience. She describes the intrusive thoughts as “scorpions crawling around in my head” — a metaphor that inspired the title of her book Scorpions, which is published in paperback on 21 May. The book explores her decades-long struggle with the condition, which she says is often trivialised in media and society. She once received a mug reading “Obsessive Compulsive” as a gift, a gesture she found inappropriate given the seriousness of the disorder.
The phobia at the centre of her OCD is emetophobia: an intense, often paralysing fear of vomiting. Middleton has said this fear feeds directly into the compulsive side of her condition. It manifests in self-imposed routines, obsessive mental counting, and repeated checking of door handles, lights and appliances. It also drives a significant preoccupation with cleanliness and contamination — anxiety about others being sick, especially in close proximity, has affected everything from her daily life to her work. She has spoken about the difficulties of filming intimate scenes, where the fear of a co-star being unwell can amplify her distress.
Motherhood, she has said, has heightened these anxieties. Her daughter, born in August 2022, is a source of joy but also of intense worry about the child’s health and the potential for illness. At the same time, Middleton notes that the demands of caring for a child can sometimes distract from OCD rituals. She has emphasised that despite the challenges, she has learned coping mechanisms and does not want to be seen as a “liability” in her profession.
Middleton has used her platform to advocate for greater understanding, taking part in BBC Radio 4 interviews and a BBC Sounds series about OCD in 2021. She advises anyone experiencing similar symptoms to seek professional help, noting that treatment is available through the NHS.
Personal Passions and Pet Peeves
Outside her career and mental health advocacy, Middleton has a sharp sense of humour and a collection of personal quirks. She describes herself as “tenacious, romantic, organised”. The trait she most deplores in herself is impatience; in others, dawdling. Her most embarrassing moment came when she congratulated Dua Lipa on managing to release a single in such a tough industry, mistaking the global pop star for a struggling indie artist — she Googled her the next day and discovered 88 million followers.
Her superpower of choice would be “encyclopedic recall for symptoms of major diseases”. She is made unhappy by a hotel room without a bath, and dislikes her “witchy feet”. If she could bring something extinct back to life, it would be a Rowntree’s chocolate bar called Secret, which her grandmother used to sell in her post office. Her celebrity crush is Reece Shearsmith, and her guiltiest pleasure is watching Naked Attraction when her partner, Swedish film director Måns Mårlind, is out.
Love, she says, feels like “a perfect cup of coffee – warm, bittersweet, anxiety-inducing and delicious”. The worst job she has ever done was working as a Christmas elf at the Rainforest Cafe. Her biggest disappointment is that every pair of tights she has ever worn gets a hole. If she could edit her past, she would swap out a few boyfriends; if she could be someone else, it would be someone without restless legs syndrome.
Middleton once bought a house with someone and realised at the housewarming party that it was a mistake. The closest she has come to death, she says, was doing a compulsory stand-up routine in her first week of drama school. Her greatest achievement is reaching 39 without ever having a filling in her teeth. When asked whether she would rather have more sex, money or fame, she replied: “I’d like them to do shifts so I never got bored.”
The most important lesson life has taught her, she adds, is to try not to take yourself too seriously.