Kate Tomas is a “professional witch” to the A-list — and is also going out with a leading actor. She talks about spells, seduction and online trolling.
The witch Kate Tomas is giving me a Zoom tour of her many tattoos. On her left hand are the words “F*** politeness” — the point being, she explains, that “women are socialised to please others over their own safety. I’m absolutely never going to do that.” Meanwhile, her arms are adorned with images of writhing snakes (her “spiritual allies”), astrological symbols, crystals and a flick knife.
It’s fair to say that the Amazing Spider-Man star Andrew Garfield’s new girlfriend is not your conventional Hollywood plus-one. Talking to me from her remote Welsh cottage, which she is selling as a result of her fourth divorce (from a nonbinary photography producer), the 42-year-old identifies as queer, neurodiverse (she was diagnosed as having ADHD and autism in her thirties) and disabled (she has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a degenerative genetic condition, and “extensive” endometriosis), and has talked previously about being ethically nonmonogamous. And now she has tabloid reporters doorstepping her neighbours, asking, she says, “if I’m a good person. Like, I don’t care.”
Last month on her podcast, The Friday Emails, Tomas revealed that “I am in a new relationship, and I’m in love and I’m really happy.” She didn’t need to mention Garfield by name — the papers had already outed them in March, when the new couple went on a double date with the American singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers and the comedian Bo Burnham. They’ve also been papped doing the groceries in Malibu, shopping in London and leaving the sceney hotspot Chiltern Firehouse last month.
Today, wearing a 1950s cashmere beaded vest and a 1970s cream headscarf, Tomas is tight-lipped about Garfield. “It’s frustrating that no matter how accomplished or impactful a woman is, it’s always going to be more interesting if they are in a relationship with a man,” she says as her black cat, Rune, jumps on to her lap. “I don’t want to sit under anybody’s shadow.”
Tomas is no stranger to Hollywood and the corridors of power, working between London, New York and LA with, she says, Oscar-nominated actors, Pulitzer prizewinners and “many” New York Times-bestselling authors, as well as FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies. She calls herself a “professional witch” and “spiritual mentor” with “powerful intuitive abilities”, and her website includes testimonies from Lena Dunham, the New Look founder, Tom Singh, and the Will & Grace star Megan Mullally. “[Kate has] kept me out of catastrophe time and time again,” Dunham gushes. “I’d die without her.”
Using tarot cards to “structure the information” she receives, Tomas charges a rather starry £1500 ($3281) for a 45-minute reading, which includes “two full days on WhatsApp to unpack it” with her. After that she asks for a six-month minimum commitment, costing £4000 a month. “Magic takes time,” she says. “It can’t happen overnight.” What’s more, these readings are “very labour-intensive”, so she only does two or three a month. For companies, she applies a six-month minimum plus a “success fee reflective of profit, sales or growth”.
Such price tags, she maintains, are “a political act — to choose how to charge for your time, specifically as a woman. I could charge £1 million a session and that would be completely ethical because I’m not exploiting anybody.” She’s unapologetic about liking money: “I’m a Taurean — I like luxury. I always have.” Around her wrist is a “wealth” talisman — a 17th-century gold charm in the shape of a hand holding a coin (she sells “astrological talismans” under the name Ouroboros Limited Editions).
What you’re paying for with a reading, Tomas says, is the forging of a connection between her spirit guides and yours, from which she “downloads the information” needed for you to lead your “best life”. Tomas won’t be drawn on whether she has read Garfield’s cards, but given his viral “What astrological sign are you?” flirting with the YouTuber Amelia Dimoldenberg at last year’s Golden Globes, one assumes he’s into astrology.
Meanwhile, for £69, you can book in to Tomas’s seduction masterclass (the next one is in August) and gain the insights that presumably bagged Garfield. But do not make the mistake of assuming that Tomas bewitched him. In fact she initially removed the masterclass from sale because, as she states on her podcast, of the “horrific accusations that were levelled at me that I’d used magic to seduce my partner”. True seduction, as she teaches, “is not about magic spells or manipulation. It has got nothing to do with how perfect their teeth are — thank you, Reddit [its threads are full of Tomas haters] — or whether they conform to conventional standards of beauty. People that are really attractive are full of charisma because they are authentically themselves and confidently anchored in that.”
Born in the UK, Tomas grew up in Brunei, where her father worked in the oil industry. She was 12 or 13, she says, when she first realised she had “intuitive” abilities: “I was experiencing what felt like overwhelming sensorial experiences. It felt like extra information about things … that other people didn’t see, which I now understand as spiritual beings.” She has no witch ancestry — her parents, she says, were “dogmatic atheists and very antispiritual — I learnt to keep my mouth shut”. But she would go to the library to research magic and work out what she could mention “without raising eyebrows”.
The most powerful form of psychic protection is knowing who you are and being OK with that.
She moved back to the UK at the age of 11 and when she was 17 began offering tarot readings in a “tiny room above a crystal shop” in Glastonbury. Two years later she started her “spiritual apprenticeship” while studying classics at the University of Kent (she later completed a PhD in Catholic theology at Oxford). Her reputation grew by word of mouth, she says, and soon the celebs came knocking: in the Noughties she read for a model agent, who then sent her supermodel clients; another customer, a PR exec, sent her celebrity clients. And the corporates then followed, from the TV networks to the hedge funds.
Tomas says she mostly refuses to perform spells for clients, despite “hexing the ex” being a continual request. Why? “I don’t want the responsibility. I want to empower other people to access their own capacity to change their life, so I train them how to do ritual magic.” Intuition, she adds, “is a faculty we all have. I don’t think of it as supernatural.”
The protection spells she teaches her celebrity clients have come in handy recently: “The simplest one is visualising yourself in a bubble, and that bubble pushing away anything that’s not good for you,” she says. Though, she adds, “it’s one thing to say, ‘This is what you should do.’ It’s like that Mike Tyson quote, ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.’”
She admits that dating movie stars comes at a price. “They [the paps] will take maybe 150 pictures, then they choose the four where you look worst,” she says. What’s most depressing, she adds, is the “misogynistic nature of that interest — criticism of how a woman looks, of what [she] does for work.” On her podcast she mentions encountering misogyny from other women online: “F***ing hell, nothing could prepare me for having literally thousands of women telling me I’m ugly, I’m unattractive, I’m less than in every conceivable way.” So she “fell back on the practices” she teaches, she says, “moving out of that victim space and reclaiming the power that has been taken from you. That might be screaming into a pillow, or doing a cord-cutting spell, or putting a dome of energy, like a bell jar, over somebody that’s actively harmful.” But, she adds: “The most powerful form of psychic protection is knowing who you are and being OK with that.”
Given that we’re talking witchcraft — at best a subjective, mysterious art, at worst a scam, as those Redditors love to point out — I wanted to verify those glowing testimonials. Dunham and Singh didn’t respond to my requests (Singh’s reads: “The information she has access to is astonishing”), but another client, the Australian gallerist Jade Torres, replied with high praise: “In those moments of indecision, she always has the right answer. After every reading, you leave feeling empowered and as if you have a secret weapon.”
Whatever your view on witchcraft, perhaps Tomas’s greatest gift to the world right now is showing that it’s possible for a Hollywood star to date someone his own age, with no glam squad or orthodontist, just tons of smarts and soul, and zero f***s given.
Written by: Fleur Britten
© The Times of London