Meet the Globe theatre's new Romeo and Juliet

Ellie Kendrick and Adetomiwa Edun are playing a pair of star-crossed lovers at Shakespeare's home theatre.

For a 25-year-old actor fresh from RADA and an 18-year-old girl (who admittedly gained ecstatic reviews for her remarkable portrayal of Anne Frank earlier this year), this must surely be an intimidating prospect. And yet the only thing this pair seem to be jumpy about is an ensemble song and dance at the end. 'Oh, the jig,' laments Tomiwa, as he is known to his friends, suddenly looking like a down-in-the-mouth lion cub. 'That's the scariest bit.' His Juliet agrees, adding, 'We will have been lying dead for 20 minutes, then we have to stretch and get our dancing feet on.'

They are a rather touching pair: he, all sloping angles and luscious youthfulness; she, bright-eyed, tail wagging, brain almost audibly whirring. They are both intellectually equipped to deal with the verse. Prior to RADA, he did a degree in classics at Cambridge, and in October she will embark on an English degree at the same university.

This is Ellie's gap year, which she took with the express intention of 'doing loads of work and getting loads of jobs, but that didn't happen'. She left Benenden (the boarding school, near her parents' home in Kent) in July and moved to London, living first with her older brother, a computer programmer, in Holloway, and then moving in with friends in Highgate, where she remains.

She has been hanging out around The Lock Tavern in Camden and maybe or maybe not dabbling in romance - she refuses to discuss it - but no work had materialised prior to Juliet, despite her provenance as a child actor who, aged 12, had to cope with playing a child raped by her father in Waking the Dead, and bit parts in Doctors, Prime Suspect and a children's series called In 2 Minds about a girl and a dog who could talk to each other. 'I played the girl. Not the dog,' she says cheerfully.

But in January The Diary of Anne Frank aired on BBC One, with Ellie in the title role. 'Everything about her performance is right,' trilled one newspaper critic. 'Beautifully acted,' another concurred. The show was shot in 2007 and Ellie had almost forgotten about it. 'I'd been going up for things but I hadn't got anything and then Anne Frank came out and there was a sudden flurry. I got a call saying they wanted to see me at the Globe, which was incredible because I'd been coming here since I was 12. My parents are big Shakespeare fans.'

Ellie, who was always described as 'a chatterbox' in school reports and hasn't changed, was born in Greenwich but moved to Kent when she was seven after her parents - her mother is an events planner and her father is a barrister - decided that a more bucolic life would be preferable for her and her brother and sister.

Tomiwa's parents made a similar decision, sending him, aged ten, from their home in Lagos to Port Regis, a boarding school in Dorset. His father is a Nigerian financier and his mother is half-Ghanaian and half-English. 'So we had connections and family in England,' he says. 'Lagos is brilliant. The heat and the humidity, the bustle and vibrancy - you can taste the air.' Nonetheless, he loved the English countryside, apart from the cold. 'It was great being in the open countryside and able to run around in lush fields,' he says.

He went on to Eton where his parents encouraged him to audition for school plays to combat his extreme shyness. 'I auditioned for everything for two years,' he says. 'I desperately tried to get into plays and failed miserably - no one would have me. It was traumatic to begin with.' Finally he won a part in Murder in the Cathedral and found it to be 'a release for me'.

He joined the National Youth Theatre and worked with them during school holidays but didn't see acting as a career option. He did one play a year at Cambridge, tried for RADA and took his acceptance as a good sign. He enjoyed drama school, lived in his family's flat just off Baker Street (he's still there), hung out with friends in Camden and Ethiopian restaurants on Caledonian Road and worked far harder than he'd expected. 'It required a lot of discipline, dedication and practice to learn a serious craft.'