Hayley Atwell, actrice britannique

Hayley Atwell has already starred alongside A-listers such as Emma Thompson and Keira Knightley, and with roles in two major TV series this autumn – plus a blockbuster movie in production – she’s on the brink of global superstardom. But, as Lydia Slater discovered, Britain’s Next Big Thing is doing her best to stay grounded…

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Hayley says : ’Emma Thompson wrote to me after Brideshead, saying, "You can always count on my friendship"’

As befits an accomplished actress, Hayley Atwell knows how to make an entrance. She arrives at our photo shoot in a Clockwork Orange-style bowler hat, a skin-tight leopard-print dress that clings to her curves and spike-heeled Vivienne Westwood boots. Behind her, on a scarlet lead, trots her long-haired dachshund Tandy (‘as in Jessica’) who promptly relieves herself on the pavement. Hayley, unruffled, whips out a plastic bag and clears up the mess. ‘You can’t get too Hollywood if you’ve got a dog,’ she says cheerfully.

One could forgive Hayley, 28, a few starry airs and graces. A voluptuous, feline beauty with a talent to match, she’s had lead roles in films such as The Duchess and Brideshead Revisited. This autumn, she is starring in two major TV series for Channel 4 : The Pillars of the Earth and Any Human Heart. The Pillars of the Earth, an epic Ken Follett bestseller, is set in 12th-century England. Hayley plays Aliena, a wilful aristocrat brought down by power struggles during a time of civil war. She filmed with co-stars Rufus Sewell, Matthew Macfadyen and Donald Sutherland in Budapest over a five-month period and, although she invited her mother and her boyfriend to stay, admits that the shoot took its toll.

‘The novelty of staying in a hotel and being in a new place does wear off after a bit, and it can be very hard on relationships,’ she says. Thinking herself into the role of Aliena made coping more difficult still. ‘She loses everything and has to start again from the ground up. On my very last day, I had to film being brutally raped,’ she says. ‘After that, I decided I wouldn’t say yes to roles just because they were offered to me.’

Any Human Heart, an adaptation of William Boyd’s novel, was a less arduous experience. It follows the fortunes of Logan Mountstuart, who despite being personally insignificant, meets many of the 20th century’s most influential figures, from Hitler to Virginia Woolf. Hayley plays Logan’s second wife, Freya, opposite Matthew Macfadyen, coincidentally her co-star in Pillars. ‘The scenes we had together were mostly supposed to be domestic bliss, hanging out on a sofa, smoking fake cigarettes and talking about what we were going to cook that night,’ she says. And right now, she’s at Shepperton Studios filming Captain America, a £150 million blockbuster set in the Second World War, starring Chris Evans (Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four) as the superhero. Hayley has landed the role of Peggy Carter, his girlfriend who works undercover for the French Resistance.

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‘Peggy has to look as if she’s able to outrun men while wearing heels,’ says Hayley, demonstrating by striding very fast up London’s Highgate Hill (rather than sitting down for our chat, she’s suggested taking Tandy for a walk). ‘And she’s very tough, so I’ve been doing military circuits round Primrose Hill six times a week.’ She has also learnt how to handle a machine gun and revels in hanging out with her co-star Tommy Lee Jones.

A naturally chatty person, she finds the hype-building secrecy surrounding this particular project rather irksome, but as an adaptation of a Marvel comic, it’s all about the franchising. ‘I wouldn’t be allowed to do a DC Comics film for years, if ever,’ she laughs. ‘It’s like Coke and Pepsi.’ She’s already been hauled over the coals for revealing Jones would be taking a role in the film before he’d officially accepted it, and reveals that she has to keep her script in a locked box. ‘We can’t even call it Captain America on set – we have to use a code word,’ she confides.
Nevertheless, the experience has made her hungry for other big-budget movies. ‘It looks stunning and the scale of it is hard to comprehend.’ (Indeed, a few days after our meeting, snatched photos emerge of a submarine being lowered into Liverpool Dock…) Despite previously declaring that nothing would induce a move to Los Angeles, Hayley has now decided to take the plunge. ‘I can work with people over there who I’d never meet here. And I have an American passport and an American agent, so it makes sense.’

Hayley is, in fact, half American, through her father, Grant, who has Native American roots (his other name is Star Touches Earth). She was brought up at the ‘pretty grim’ end of Notting Hill, years before Hugh Grant made it fashionable, and her parents separated when she was two. Grant now lives in California where he works as a massage therapist, while her mother Alison is a motivational speaker, and, says her daughter, a dedicated truth seeker. ‘She’s a searcher, constantly digging and exploring and questioning.’

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As a result, Hayley’s childhood was eccentric to say the least. ‘Firewalks, sweat lodges, tarot readings,’ she reels off. ‘At one self-healing workshop I heard a woman telling my mum, “My God, my inner child kept me up all night !” Another time, a woman wanted to show the group a dance inspired by her first experience of lovemaking, so she stripped off all her clothes and danced to ‘Heal the World’ by Michael Jackson.’ Hayley was eight at the time. Wasn’t she embarrassed ? ‘Yes, but I also found it so rich,’ she says earnestly. ‘I think it helped me as an actor because when I went to drama school and had to pretend to be a tree or the colour blue, I was fine with that. I’d seen so much at such a young age that nothing really embarrassed me.’

Not that she will be trying to replicate that upbringing for her own offspring. ‘I wouldn’t change it for the world, but I will bring up my own children differently,’ she says. ‘I want to build my life on the “Sunday lunch, no TV during the week” model. I wasn’t treated like that. I was an adult, Mum’s friend. There wasn’t any discipline really. I was like Saffy out of Ab Fab, but with an edge.’

Although the navel-gazing workshops gave her an aura of maturity, her classmates at Sion-Manning, the gritty Catholic girls’ comprehensive she attended, were less impressed. ‘Someone would come up and say, “Your shoes are s*** !” And I’d go [she puts on a caring voice] “How is it at home ? Tell me about your relationship with your mum…”’ This approach got her cordially disliked, and even though she and her mother had no money and lived in a housing association maisonette at the rough end of Ladbroke Grove, she was bullied for being posh. ‘So then I made it my mission to be liked and worked my way round the school and ended up getting voted head girl.’

‘I was Mum’s friend, like Saffy out of Ab Fab with an edge’

In a sense, her entire childhood seems to have been spent performing a variety of roles : first, the Golden Child, then the Streetwise Teen, and subsequently, at the London Oratory (where she sat her A-levels), the Academic High-flyer. Only when Hayley had won herself a place to study philosophy and theology at Oxford did she feel that she’d proved herself sufficiently to follow her own desires. ‘I took a deep breath, and thought, “Well, now I can be an actor.” It was always what I wanted to do. It’s something to do with the need to express myself and not knowing quite how to do that all the time in everyday life.’

So she turned her back on the dreaming spires, opting instead for a place at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Two weeks after she graduated, she won her first television role as the manic-depressive, self-harming daughter of a disgraced politician in the BBC drama The Line of Beauty and drew rave critical reviews.
The following year, she appeared in Woody Allen’s film Cassandra’s Dream, and was just pipped to The Other Boleyn Girl by Scarlett Johansson. In 2008, she tackled the brittle Julia Flyte in the film Brideshead Revisited, winning the admiration of Emma Thompson, who played Lady Marchmain. ‘I’ve still got this letter pinned up that she wrote to me afterwards,’ says Hayley. ‘It said, “You’re a fine, distinctive actor and I’m determined to work with you again, and till then you can always count on my friendship.”’ (Thompson has been as good as her word and has had Hayley to stay for the weekend. ‘I’m writing it all down for my grandchildren,’ says Hayley.)

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That same year, in The Duchess, she played Bess Foster, love rival to the Duchess of Devonshire, a role that required her to get up close and personal with both the Duke (Ralph Fiennes) and Duchess (Keira Knightley), and snatched the Aubusson rug from under Knightley’s feet. And, this year, she starred in a TV remake of the 60s sci-fi drama series The Prisoner, with Sir Ian McKellen and Jim Caviezel.
By anybody’s standards, hers has already been a glittering career. But Hayley still has a poverty mentality, a legacy of her childhood, and can’t acknowledge her own success. ‘A lot of the girls at Sion-Manning think I’ve made it but I’m constantly meeting people who are mind-blowing, talented or incredibly lucky, and I have no sense of myself in any of that,’ she says. Stanley Tucci, her co-star in Captain America, recently introduced her to his friend, The Devil Wears Prada star Emily Blunt (niece of Prisons Minister Crispin Blunt and daughter of a barrister). ‘How great is it to come from where I’ve come from, with no contacts, and be having dinner with someone who has incredible talent, and socially comes from a completely different background ?’ she says humbly. ‘If I’d been at school with her, I’d have had a massive girl crush.’

Hayley is, in fact, going out with the playwright and director Gabriel Bisset-Smith, whose political satire The Charming Man is currently playing at a small London theatre. They first met at the Guildhall and, according to Hayley, loathed each other for years. ‘I thought he was quite hideous, a real idiot, and he thought I was a people pleaser full of spiritual rubbish.’ Years later, they met again and became friends ; they have been an item for the past year and a half. ‘Gabriel is very thoughtful and loyal, and the most honest person I’ve ever met,’ she says. ‘He had a very bohemian upbringing, not spiritual like mine, but artistic. So we understand each other. We don’t stop bickering, and it’s the most authentic relationship I’ve ever had.’

The couple live in Primrose Hill, and Hayley revels in domesticity when she has the time. ‘I was mad on the BBC’s Great British Bake Off,’ she sighs. ‘When I was doing Any Human Heart I was bringing banana loaves and cupcakes in for everyone.’
Although she has been open about her longing for children in the past, Hayley has now decided to put motherhood off for a while. ‘Gabriel and I don’t come from family-orientated backgrounds, really,’ she explains. ‘Which means that I don’t know whether wanting children is because I’d like the experience of bringing children into the world, or because I have a core need to have that sense of family. So instead of trying to have children or change the world, I’m making an effort to slow down a bit on that front.’

On all other fronts, however, her guns are blazing. And if, as I expect, she captivates Tinseltown as effortlessly as she has her home country, Tandy the dachshund will have her work cut out keeping her mistress’s feet on the ground.

Source : DailyMail du 30/10/2010 par Lydia Slater