Hayley Atwell on theatre, Tom Cruise and the tabloids: ‘I’ve reached the purpose the place I’m OK if I’m not appreciated’

Before assembly Hayley Atwell, I’m proven to an empty dressing room down the hall from the place she is rehearsing in London for her upcoming position as Beatrice in A lot Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare’s comedian story of affection and deception. The room is empty save for a jug of water, some make-up and hairdressing tools and, on the ground, a splendidly garish pair of crimson patent leather-based platform sneakers.

Atwell can be sporting them as Beatrice, who she performs reverse Tom Hiddleston’s Benedick. “They’re my dancing sneakers,” she says when she arrives. “Each morning at 11 the sneakers go on and we dance [as part of rehearsal for the show]. It’s expressive, it’s fashionable however in no way gimmicky.” It seems dancing in entrance of an viewers is a primary for her. Is she out of her consolation zone? “Really no. The giddy freeness of it’s extra in step with who I’m. It’s definitely not just like the interval dramas I’ve achieved, or all the intense stuff. Individuals inform me on a regular basis: ‘You’re a lot funnier than I realised.’ I suppose it’s good when folks underestimate you in that manner as a result of it doesn’t take a lot to impress them.”

It’s onerous to think about anybody underestimating Atwell’s skilled expertise. After 20 years within the enterprise, the actor – who’s 42 – has proved herself a outstanding all-rounder, equally snug on the stage in a Jacobean tragedy (Ladies Beware Ladies), in TV costume dramas (Mansfield Park, Howards Finish, Brideshead Revisited), main a Marvel sequence (Agent Carter), or dangling over a cliff in an upturned practice carriage in an motion franchise (Mission: Inconceivable). Whereas being admitted into the Marvel universe shifted her profession up a gear – Atwell made her entrance as Agent Carter in 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger earlier than starring within the TV spin-off – it’s Mission: Inconceivable, the place she co-stars with Tom Cruise, that has thrust her into Hollywood’s huge league.

As Atwell’s star has risen, she has more and more set boundaries when speaking to journalists. Although she isn’t lower than well mannered, I start to surprise if the sculptural, knuckle duster-style ring she wears throughout two fingers is there as a warning to interviewers lest they get too nosy. Whereas she’s going to fortunately chat about present tasks and the intricacies of efficiency, she is much less eager on digging into the previous, resisting what she calls the “narrative” that may develop round actors, by which she means the oft-repeated tales from earlier of their careers. “I all the time consider that Joan Didion quote: ‘I’ve already misplaced contact with a few folks I was,’” she explains. “There’s typically this narrative that, even when respectful and correct to completely different occasions [of life], is sort of reductive.”

Household can be off limits, which I uncover once I ask if A lot Ado is her first job since having a child final yr (her accomplice is music producer Ned Wolfgang Kelly). “Who stated I had a child?” she asks, giving me a glance. The Day by day Mail, I say, when it ran images of her lifting her child right into a pram. Fairly fairly, this elicits a sigh. “The humorous factor in regards to the Day by day Mail,” Atwell displays, “is that it represents the bottom manner we deal with our artists. To be a girl adopted by a person who’s a stranger and who’s hiding in a bush taking footage of you with out your data, not to mention consent, and promoting it to a publication that pays to show you … I do know that I’m meant to simply go: ‘OK, effectively, I requested for it [in this job].’ However it would by no means be OK with me.”

As for speaking about new motherhood, she continues: “I can’t go there on one thing that’s simply too treasured. And I’ve realized that to talk for anybody in my private life that hasn’t chosen a life within the public eye, it does them a disservice.”

Again to theatre, then, which is Atwell’s old flame, professionally talking. “I like that you just are available in daily and also you’ve bought your script underneath your arm and a espresso, and also you’re within the West Finish the place there may be this rapid feeling of a theatre group,” she says. “Theatre does for me what church can do for many individuals. I nonetheless actually really feel that.” The very first thing she requested A lot Ado’s director Jamie Lloyd – who solid her in 2011’s The Religion Machine and 2013’s The Delight – when he instructed she play Beatrice was: “Precisely how [traditionally] ‘Hey nonny nonny’ is it going to be?”

As soon as he’d defined that form of factor wasn’t his type, she was all in. She loves the play for its comedy but additionally for the complexities of Beatrice who’s unbiased, upbeat and engaged in a “merry struggle” of wits with Benedick. “At one level, her uncle says he’s heard that she will have a nightmare and nonetheless get up laughing,” Atwell says. “And I believe there may be a lot disappointment in that, as a result of everybody round her thinks: ‘Oh, she’s so enjoyable, you don’t have to fret about her.’ However she’s been so harm that humour has change into her coping mechanism and her armour.”

Atwell’s prolonged break from the stage has coincided along with her tenure on Mission: Inconceivable, the place she performs Grace, the light-fingered, morally ambiguous heroine drawn into Ethan Hunt’s newest mission. The franchise has, she says, been all-encompassing, despite the fact that the final movie, Useless Reckoning Half One – described by critic Mark Kermode as a “genuinely breathtaking romp” – was delayed by Covid. The eighth movie within the sequence, Mission: Inconceivable – The Remaining Reckoning comes out this Might, “which suggests I’ll have been engaged on Mission for five-and-a-half years, which for me is exceptional. I imply, thank God I cherished it.”

Even now, they’re nonetheless doing reshoots which contain “fleshing out scenes or altering issues round. They’re all the time tinkering and seeking to make issues higher. So even whereas [working on Much Ado], I can get a name at any time.” Working with Cruise has been a delight: “After I began, I used to be very conscious of the rarefied air round him and the way there isn’t a one like him. And there by no means can be as a result of actors aren’t made like him any extra. He’s a one-man studio and, to me, very sort, very skilled. And due to that, I felt I used to be in a position to attempt a number of various things. There was by no means a danger of failure or being unsafe. Tom actually likes folks to thrive on set.”

You’ll be able to see why Cruise and Atwell work effectively collectively: each have a fierce work ethic and take their artwork extremely severely. Unusually for an motion film, there isn’t a script when Mission: Inconceivable begins capturing and improvisation is actively inspired (it was Atwell’s concept that Grace ought to be a pickpocket). “There’ll be Tom going: ‘From 5 years previous I’ve all the time wished to leap from a cliff on a bike’, and realising his dream. However with the remaining, they’re form of making it up as they go. After I auditioned, they had been clear they had been in search of somebody who likes to work on this manner, and that it’s not for everybody. I additionally needed to be ready for 5 months of full-time bodily coaching and to be dynamic sufficient to study battle sequences, to float in a automobile with Tom, to have the ability to shoot a gun and work with knives.” Can Atwell verify that that is the final movie within the franchise? She pauses. “I imply, look, they known as it The Remaining Reckoning. However, ‘Tom Cruise’ and ‘remaining’ are oxymorons, so I wouldn’t be stunned if he goes: “Wait, possibly …’ Though he has so many issues he’s engaged on, so I can’t see how one other Mission would match into that.”

When Atwell was rising up, the appearing seed was planted early. Her mom named her after the Whistle Down the Wind actor Hayley Mills and often took her to the theatre. A pivotal second got here when she noticed Ralph Fiennes in Hamlet at east London’s Hackney Empire when she was 11 (she additionally lauds her good friend Ben Whishaw’s Hamlet, particularly his “To be or to not be” speech, which she instructs me to observe on YouTube as a matter of urgency). Atwell’s mother and father divorced when she was little: her father, an American photographer and therapeutic massage therapist, returned to Kansas the place his daughter would spend her summer time holidays; the remainder of the time she lived along with her mom in Ladbroke Grove, west London. She remembers at secondary college each her friends and lecturers continuously asking her to learn excerpts of books out loud. Beforehand a shy and introverted little one, as a teen she wowed a faculty meeting studying a Puck monologue from A Midsummer Evening’s Dream whereas sporting inexperienced leggings.

“The British aspect of me was all: ‘Oh God, that wasn’t cool in any respect.’ It wasn’t good to be keen about something at that age. However the American in me was all: ‘Oh my God, that was so nice, I wish to do it once more.’ I cherished the concept of with the ability to use language as a device to make folks really feel one thing. I actually felt that my mind wakened.”

Starting appearing correct, Atwell determined she wished to “do all of it”, which means she didn’t wish to keep in theatre or be marooned on TV police procedurals. So she skilled onerous, enrolling at London’s Guildhall College of Music and Drama the place she went deep into the nuts, bolts and philosophy of efficiency. “I knew that’s what it will take to have a craft and maintain it over a whole lifetime,” she explains. “It was one thing that wanted rigorous follow, expertise, respect, reverence to the craft.”

Rising from drama college, she was “all the time assured. I by no means doubted myself though I did doubt the enterprise. I’d see folks round me who had been extremely proficient [not working] and realise it’s typically simply right down to luck who’s getting these roles. And that was liberating, since you suppose: ‘Properly, I can solely do my finest, and there are all these different issues I can’t management.’”

Atwell has spoken prior to now about being informed by a producer on the set of Brideshead Revisited to drop extra pounds, which prompted her co-star Emma Thompson to leap to her defence and inform her: “You’re not a mannequin, you’re an actor.” A decade in the past, when she was taking part in Agent Carter, she additionally bemoaned being Photoshopped for the entrance cowl of a German journal. At present she observes “that factor” that ladies do of “filtering ourselves, or decreasing ourselves to slot in or to people-please, partly as a result of ladies don’t have a tendency to have the ability to fail upwards in the way in which males do. However then comes that time the place you go: ‘I’m actually OK if I’m not appreciated.’ I believe I’ve developed sufficient of an understanding of the enterprise that I can cease worrying about that.”

It’s with clear satisfaction that she says she is now extra skilled and has clout within the trade. “I can specific a desire for issues. I’m in a extra creatively fertile place that’s much less fear-based, and the place failure is completely allowed. I’m not asking for permission from others to attempt new issues, as I can provide myself permission and I’ll personal it if it doesn’t work.” Better of all, she notes, is that “I can say no, I received’t do this. It’s not for me.”