Sophie Ellis-Bextor on Her Larger-Than-Life ‘Disco Superhero’ Look at BAFTAS 2024

“I don’t think the BAFTAs is the time to be meek, is it?” asks Sophie Ellis-Bextor days before she takes her “old friend,” the 2001 pop-disco ditty “Murder on the Dancefloor,” to the stage at London’s Royal Festival Hall for British film’s big night. “Now is the time to be larger than life.”

Telephoning Vogue from her sequin-saturated dressing room, which doubles up as one of her son’s bedrooms (how fabulous), Ellis-Bextor is plotting out a look befitting a “disco superhero.” An innate magpie, surrounding herself with “twinkly things” makes her happy and she spends all her spare time on tour stocking up on shimmering pieces from vintage stores that match her spirit. “The most amazing thing about clothes is they put you in the right mood,” she shares of her “quirky” stagewear. “You want things that move with you—and sequins dance a lot.”

She feels “fizzy” about the BAFTAs, like all her birthdays have come at once, because the glossy world of television is different from her usual rock circle (Sophie married British music producer Richard Jones in 2005). She’s also still on the “mad adventure” spawned by Saltburn*—*Emerald Fennell’s psychological Noughties romp, in which Barry Keoghan quite literally murders the dance floor naked. “It was dark and twisted and totally my thing,” enthuses Ellis-Bextor, who signed off her permission simply knowing that it would be “all of the song, and none of the clothes.”