Enola Holmes 3 arrived on Netflix on the first of July 2026. In its cast — alongside the names on the poster — is a face style watchers have known for over a decade: the silver crop, the red lip, the poise that never asks permission. Nichollette Yardley-Moore is on my studio wall too. This is the story of that session.
Some sitters need a look built for them. She arrived finished.
The Sunday Times once placed her among the women redefining fifty. She has modelled for knitwear books and jewellery collections, designed one-of-a-kind pieces from vintage textiles under her own name, and been stopped in Liberty by strangers who recognised her without quite knowing from where. Casting has known for years: Bord Gáis built branded content around her as a Gangster Granny; Bosch, McDonald's and White Stuff have all put her in front of cameras. And now Netflix has. My job, when she walked in, was not to invent a single thing. It was to get all of it into frames a casting office can use.
She brought a wardrobe of black. Nice and simple.
The profile
We started against the warmest wall in the studio — gold-toned plaster, a black fur collar, her face turned into the light. This is the heritage frame: stillness, elegance, the quality that gets cast when a script says presence and means it. The silver hair does the work colour normally does; everything else stays quiet and lets it.
The stare
Then the opposite. Flat dark ground, arms crossed, eyes straight down the lens, nothing offered. Older actresses are forever asked to be warm — this frame is for the parts that aren't asking. Matriarchs, judges, the woman who owns the building. It needed no direction at all, which tells you why the lead roles keep coming.
The silhouette
Most headshot sessions never leave the shoulders. We did — full length on grey: pleated skirt, argyle tights, black hiking boots, hand on hip, and the laugh that ran the whole room. For some castings the silhouette is the character, and hers is authored head to toe. No stylist built that combination. Decades did.
Why the lines stay
I have spent nearly thirty years behind a camera, the last twenty photographing actors, and the rule has never changed: the picture must match the person who walks into the casting room. So the lines stay. The texture stays. What a face has earned is not a flaw to be sanded off — it is the CV, printed where casting can read it. Netflix did not cast a retouched idea of a woman; it cast this one.
A lifetime of style, none of it borrowed.
A session built across looks — tight elegance to full-length character — is what the Director's Session exists for.
Photographed at my studio in Seven Sisters, North London.