Hayley Atwell, The Sunday Telegraph

interview
Hayley Atwell – star of the Brideshead Revisited remake and now, it seems, just about everything else
– has known from the earliest age where she was heading, and at what pace. With le tout Hollywood
clamouring for a piece of her, she tells Tim Auld why they might jolly well have to wait
DAYDREAM
BELIEVER
Photograph by Laura Hynd
‘Precocious. I was never precocious,’ says
Hayley Atwell. ‘Someone else wrote that I’d said
I was precocious as a child and my mum read
it and went, “You were never precocious, you
just knew what you wanted to call your future
kids when you were seven.”’ The 26-year-old
actress’s eyes sparkle and her features –
summed up by one critic, breathlessly, if
entirely accurately, as ‘stupendously beautiful’
– break into a grin of self-mockery.
We have been talking about Atwell’s habit, as
a child, of writing letters to her future self to
remind her of dreams she needed to fulfil. Call
it precocious, call it what you will, it points to
a degree of ambition scarily beyond that found
in the common herd. And Atwell is the first to
admit that she was an extravagant dreamer.
Nevertheless, I doubt that even she could have
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Dress by Yves Saint Laurent. Stylist: Camilla Pole. Hair and make-up: Becca Harrison, using the Organic Pharmacy
interview
imagined quite how
rapid an ascent she’d
make in the dramatic
firmament.
One story that
interviewers delight in
repeating is of her first
job, making an advert
for Pringles crisps.
I can understand why.
It allows one to puncture
her bubble for a brief
moment before adopting
more reverential tones, because, since
she first appeared in 2006 as Cat Fedden,
the self-harming, straight-talking
daughter of a Tory MP in Andrew
Davies’s television adaptation of Alan
Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty,
she has hardly put a foot wrong.
Consider her CV: before The Line of
Beauty had been broadcast, just eight
months out of drama school she landed
a role alongside Ewan McGregor
and Colin Farrell in Woody Allen’s
Cassandra’s Dream. Since then she’s
appeared with Billie Piper in a television
adaptation of Mansfield Park, for the RSC
in Middleton’s Women Beware Women,
at the National Theatre in Etherege’s The
Man of Mode and as the lead in Bernard
Shaw’s Major Barbara. She starred in two
of last year’s biggest openings, as Julia
Flyte in the film remake of Brideshead
Revisited and alongside Keira Knightley
in The Duchess. Both Woody Allen and
the National Theatre’s director Nicholas
Hytner had no hesitation in employing
her within minutes of meeting her, and
she now has a powerful agent making
waves for her in Hollywood.
It’s become de rigueur to hail her as
the next big thing in British acting. But,
what, in fact, is ‘next’ about Atwell? She
could already claim to have earned ‘big
thing’ status, though she’d never indulge
in such crude categorisations. When
I suggest to her that, by the mere fact of
working for Allen, she’ll already have set
alarm bells ringing in Hollywood, she
deadpans, ‘Have I? I don’t know.’
We meet at a smart East End restaurant
on a bitterly cold January evening. It is
the end of her first day back at work after
Christmas, rehearsing Lindsay Posner’s
new production of Arthur Miller’s A View
from the Bridge, and, as she walks into
would have spoken. It’s
an added stress, she
concedes, before launching
convincingly into some
With ewan mcgregor, woody
the bar, the slightness
Mafioso-style banter about
allen and colin farrell, and
of her 5ft 6½in frame
buying a cup of ‘cwaafee’.
(right) in ‘the line of beauty’
is highlighted by the
What’s intriguing is that
burly presence of her
she’s on the British stage
co-star Ken Stott by
at all. Young actors like
her side.
her (the Emily Mortimers,
the Damian Lewises),
weighed down with the
n screen and on
yoke of being the next big
stage Atwell has
thing, have tended to make
played women who
a beeline for Hollywood.
are mercurial, sexy,
But Atwell seems in no
steely, scheming,
hurry, happy to keep all
smug, streetwise,
three balls of television, film and theatre
unhinged and vulnerable. There’s
in the air, emulating the great British
usually something deceptively
actors of an older generation, Judi
complicated going on behind her
Dench, Eileen Atkins, Helen Mirren et al.
characteristic cat-that-got-the-cream
These battle-hardened British exports
smile, which is exaggerated by two
seem to have a cachet in Hollywood
knowing little dimples on either side of
because of their versatility, their
her lips. In person, dressed in a simple
accomplishment in all forms of drama.
pink V-neck sweater and jeans, her dark
Was this something Atwell was aware of
hair scraped back into a ponytail, she
when she finished drama school?
exudes none of this danger. She is just
‘I think that there is a generation of us
incredibly youthful and startlingly selfwho came out of drama school that has
possessed. Sipping a glass of red wine
tried to do everything,’ she says. ‘I think
she enthuses about Arthur Miller. ‘He’s
the shift has been that when you used
a genius and he writes family drama so
to come out of drama school you’d start
brilliantly and it’s colloquial and it feels
as spear carrier number four and you’d
natural but it follows an extraordinary
apprentice and if you were lucky enough
structure and it’s like Greek tragedy.’
you’d get to the RSC and then you’d
She speaks in crystal-clear received
eventually build yourself up to bigger
pronunciation, with only the hint of
roles, and then maybe after that you’d
the odd dropped ‘t’, a kind of concession
break into television, and maybe after
to being ‘yoof’, but you feel her heart’s
that you’d break into film. Because
not really in it. She also uses the
there’s just a lot more opportunity now
American ‘gotten’ for ‘got’ (her father
within film and television I never felt
is American) and will often finish
that I’d just have to start from theatre.
a statement with the word ‘yeah’, used
I wanted to be able to do all of those
as a kind of self-affirmatory tick.
things. There are American actors I’ve
For this production, though, she’s had
met who have this amazing ambition
to master a Brooklyn accent of the 1950s,
to launch and star in big films, and I’m
and, along with other members of the
going, “But you’ve got to do Shakespeare
cast, has been assiduously studying
first, you’ve got to be earnest and
tapes of the way Miller’s characters
O
‘There are actors
who have this
amazing ambition
to star in big films,
and I go, “But
you’ve got to do
Shakespeare first”’
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interview
serious,” and they’re like, “No, I don’t
want to do that.”’
How long Atwell will be able to juggle
her career is another question. She is
now represented in Hollywood by the
powerful Hilda Crealey, whose clients
include Cate Blanchett. On a recent trip
to Los Angeles to publicise Brideshead
Revisited Atwell found herself at the
blunt end of Crealey’s ambition, being
told, in no uncertain terms, ‘The only
limits are those in your own head.’
Atwell herself admits she is not immune
to the charms of Hollywood. ‘When
I was over there I met quite a lot of
people and within a few days I was like,
“I’m gonna do this and I’m gonna…
Ah, fabulous, I’m going to be fabulous,”
and it was contagious.’
So what does Crealey make of Atwell
working on the British stage? Is there
a conflict there? For the first time Atwell’s
easy-going mask slips, revealing the
tough cookie who’s got what she wants,
when she wants, and will continue,
one suspects, to do so. ‘I don’t listen to
anyone else,’ she says. ‘I don’t listen at all,
because at the end of the day if I realise
I’ve taken a job because of some pressure
from some external source then I realise
that I’m not in it, myself. And I think
my own sanity, my own kind of living
experience, is going to be much better
than trying to please Hollywood.’
T
he key to Atwell’s extraordinary
self-possession and iron will lies in
her childhood. Her hippyish parents
divorced when she was two. Her
American father, Grant – or Star Touches
Earth, to give him his other name (he’s
part Native American) – returned to
live in California, where he works as
a photographer-cum-massage therapist
(‘He’s very hug a tree, get naked and
chant,’ Atwell has said). Atwell grew up
with her mother, Alison, a motivational
speaker, near Ladbroke Grove in west
London. There were few rules, and
Atwell was encouraged to think freely
and question authority. In short, she was
treated like an adult and from an early
age learnt that she ‘had to trust herself’.
She was a very active child. ‘I think
I was born with a lot of energy and
enthusiasm and excitement and I’d get
bored really quickly and I always wanted
something new and fast and adventurous
and a challenge and that seemed to
be in my nature.’ But there was also
the influence her mother’s job as a
motivational speaker had on the way
they spoke at home. ‘It was the language,’
she says. ‘It was absolutely my mother’s
language of how she spoke to me, of how
she related to the world, and it was also
part of her enjoyment of knowing that
she could free herself from her own
so-called limitations and that her work
gives herself such enjoyment that she
would pass it on and that
With her co-stars at the
only moment when
it would naturally rub off
premiere of ‘brideshead’
she really allows her
on me a little bit.’
frivolous, girly side
At the age of eight, after
off the leash is when
seeing Loyd Grossman
talking about what
put a live lobster into
it was like to move to
a pot of boiling water,
an all boys’ school for
she became a vegetarian
sixth form. ‘It was
(though she now eats
brilliant,’ she says.
meat and fish). She has
‘There was like this
described herself as
hormonal upheaval the
an intense girl, and
first term of going,
throughout her teenage
“Aaaaaaaah.” And walking into class and
years she espoused contentious causes
going, “Oh, my God, he looked at me. I
(‘going on antivivisection and Boycott
think he fancies me, I think he fancies
Beef marches, Free the Dolphins,
you.” Brilliant. And it was really… [pauses
anything’). She became head girl of
for deep breath] Yeah, I enjoyed it very
her secondary school, set up debating
much. I had a boyfriend from within my
societies, and acted as much as she
first two weeks and I stayed with him
could, landing the lead roles in her
throughout the whole time. I was very,
school plays. A bit of a square, then? Not
very happy and dedicated.’
in Atwell’s topsy-turvy home. For her,
As to current boyfriends, Atwell is
being organised, hard-working and
single, though she does, she says, have
disciplined was a form of rebellion,
a dachshund, to whom she is devoted,
a form of self-assertion (‘I rebelled
taking it with her to work whenever
against rebellion,’ as she has put it).
possible. When she’s not rehearsing or
She won a place at Oxford, which,
performing or filming, she says, she
in fittingly contrary fashion, she turned
‘sniffs out’ old friends to go to a pub or
down. ‘I just felt, “Well, I’ve gotten there
karaoke bar ‘or something’. She also
now. So what?” It felt like I’d kind of
likes hiking and cooking and cleaning.
done it really just to prove something to
Cleaning? ‘It’s therapeutic. A bit of
myself.’ Instead she took two gap years,
control,’ she says without hesitation.
before entering the Guildhall School of
One thing’s for certain, you won’t
Music and Drama. I’m hoping that she
find Atwell lazing about. ‘My friends put
went thoroughly off the rails during her
time out, but no. ‘I travelled and I worked me up to the challenge of swing-dance
classes,’ she tells me as we finish. ‘So we
in a casting director’s agency. I did the
might take that up once the play gets up
Rada summer school and saved up
and running. Let off some steam, and
some money and went to the States to
learn something new. Yeah.’ }
see my dad. But I knew that I would act;
I just didn’t know or not whether drama
school would be the thing for me.’
‘A View from the Bridge’ is at the
Atwell is a friendly conversationalist,
Duke of York’s, London WC2
but watchful and reserved. Indeed, the
(0870 060 6644), until 16 May
‘When I was in
Hollywood within
a few days I was
like, “Ah, fabulous,
I’m going to be
fabulous.” It was
contagious’
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