WILD ABOUT ANNABELLE

Actress Annabelle Wallis might be on the brink of being super-famous, but the serene beauty with the gypsy heart prefers to stay grounded in the real world.

Actress Annabelle Wallis might be on the brink of being super-famous, but the serene beauty with the gypsy heart prefers to stay grounded in the real world. By Cushla Chauhan. Styled by Petta Chua. Photographed by Derek Henderson.

Annabelle Wallis is excitedly describing a workout worthy of the Olympics: “We’d start in the morning with some form of pilates to stretch and align the body; then we’d do an hour of circuit work; then an hour of strength training; and after that I had to do rockclimbing and rappelling,” she enthuses, on the phone from Los Angeles.

The 32-year-old actress, who “loved” the rigorous exercise regimen required of her latest role – in The Mummy with Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe – is entering into a new stage of her 12-year-old career, one epitomised by landing a lead role in the Universal Pictures blockbuster. While having already garnered a not insignificant level of fame after appearing in hit TV shows The Tudors and Peaky Blinders, and films including The Brothers Grimsby and Mine, Wallis is breaking into the big league, achieving the kind of recognition that will see her win more plum roles, guest on talk shows and relinquish the freedom to pop out for milk without being recognised. The fact she’s attracting positive attention for her fashion sense and happens to be the girlfriend of singer Chris Martin is also sparking intrigue.

Fame in itself, though, isn’t something she seems concerned with. Right now, the vivacious Brit is simply revelling in the privilege of doing what she loves, and discussing how the physical aspect of preparing for The Mummy proved as crucial to her role as learning lines. “There are no shortcuts with Tom,” she says. “He wants authenticity, he wants 100 per cent in every scene, he wants you giving your all so the audience has the best experience.”

Wallis, who is “very sporty” and naturally athletic, easily embodies the adventurous character she portrays in the action flick, executing many of the stunts herself. “I grew up a real tomboy with my brother and did everything he did – motocross, paintball, polo …,” she explains.

Born in Oxford, England, Wallis moved to Portugal with her family when she was a child and attended school there, an experience that had a profound influence on the woman she is today as well as her chosen path. “I was learning another language and seeing the world so differently from how I would have if I’d stayed in England,” she says. “I went to an international school with 42 different nationalities in my year, so I used to change my voice, using it as a tool to help people understand me. I think in a culturally diverse environment you stay very open-minded, which is a great asset as an actor, because you have a bigger world to draw from. You’re listening to people’s life experiences and hearing their stories, so you look at the world in a broader way.”

Although she participated in school plays as a teenager and always knew she wanted to act, she was reluctant to talk about her passion. “I knew from day one, but it was very hard to articulate that, because it was not like a job I knew a lot of people were able to survive on. But it was a knowing … it was the most instinctual thing for me,” she reflects.

Moving back to London to attend drama school was the first step in taking that yearning to act more seriously, albeit a step she ended up side-stepping. “I got a job and I bolted!” she exclaims. “I realised there was something in the fact that I was a bit of a rogue in a sea of classically trained dramatists, so I think that worked in my favour.”

From that first break, Wallis landed her first professional job aged 20, playing an East End showgirl in the TV crime show Jericho; thrilled she was actually earning money for her part. “I was being asked to do something and being paid for it,

which was really quite exciting!” she says with a chuckle. Numerous auditions – “It was very hard; there’s a lot of bravery going into audition rooms” – with gigs in theatre, short films, and advertisements followed, but it wasn’t until 2013 and her acclaimed role as Grace in the British TV series Peaky Blinders that her abilities truly came into the spotlight.

While Wallis concedes that greater work opportunities have been a welcome consequence of her growing profile, the increased media interest in her personal life is something she shuns; she remains closely guarded. “I’m a very private person, so I avoid that like the plague. I wasn’t brought up to talk about my personal life. I’m my mother’s daughter and my father’s daughter and there’s a way you conduct yourself in the public space and that’s that,” she states.

“There’s this certain culture of celebrity that people expect actors to adhere to,” she continues, “but the actors I respect and the artists I look to for inspiration are the ones who you don’t know too much about. I think it’s classier to have mystery. If you play your cards right, I think you can manage that.”

To that end, the significant other in her life, Chris Martin, she only mentions in passing, while discussing the TV shows she loves. “I’ve just gone from Big Little Lies to Broadchurch,” she says. “My boyfriend was away, so I waited till he was back before watching it.”

Her closest friends, meanwhile, are those she’s known all her life, women outside the acting bubble who inspire her with their own accomplishments. “The friendships I’ve had since I was born are my greatest achievement,” she affirms. “I judge who I am by the company I keep and I feel very proud of the people I know … they keep me sane and keep me grounded.”

Now based between London and LA and with close ties to Portugal, her concept of home is a fluid one, much like her accent, which, while predominantly English, is an exotic fusion of American with, perhaps, Portuguese inflections.

London, she muses, she cherishes for its stimulation. “It’s eccentric, you can be whoever you want to be and it’s a great place to carve out your identity and it makes you feel like you’re part of something.” But she rejects labelling it home. “Home is where the people I love are and I have people in London and in LA and in Portugal. I don’t feel one place in particular is home. I’m a gypsy.”

That adaptability helps with each new project too, an opportunity to draw on the acceptance, authenticity and indeed the tomboy spirit cultivated during her girlhood in Portugal. “When I went in to work with Tom Cruise on The Mummy, or with Guy Ritchie in King Arthur, or all those boys in Peaky Blinders, I felt completely at home,” she says. “The freedom of my childhood meant I could go back there and take from the well of experience I had growing up.”

Her charisma served her well in The Mummy. Such was the rapport between herself and Cruise that writers scrapped the original script, instead writing the characters organically around how the leads interacted. Wallis admits, however, acting alongside Cruise still felt surreal. “When he’s shaped your cinematic experience your whole life you can’t compute the feeling; you don’t quite believe it’s happening, so you go on this automatic mode, where you seem really calm but in your head you’re saying: ‘Oh, my god! It’s Tom Cruise!’” she says gleefully.

“I used to say to Tom: ‘You know, sometimes when I hated going to the gym I’d put on Mission Impossible music and pretend I was running in a scene with Tom Cruise.’ And then all of a sudden there I was, running in a scene with Tom Cruise! Talk about manifesting your dreams …”

Working with both Cruise and Crowe were career highlights for Wallis. As, too, was realising a character she respected. “Getting to play a strong female who is standalone equal to the man, I feel very proud of that,” she says. “What’s interesting now is what people are looking for in female protagonists: they want women to be equal to the man. It seems so odd that you and I are on the phone talking about how women are seen and paid and how it’s changing … I find it bizarre that we’re still even having that conversation. It’s definitely a discussion that’s well due. For me, I know that I’m not believable in the role of a submissive wife, because I don’t walk into a room as a submissive female. I walk in with a brain and I have an opinion and it might be too much and I might not get a lot of parts. There are a lot of amazing actresses, writers and thinkers and people who are giving us all a voice and that’s what is important … to shine the light on a conversation that is going on and to help girls who are coming up. Hopefully, that finds a way to bleed into parts of the world that really need it and it’s not only for our benefit in the West, but affects global change.”

Wallis’s strength of character filters through to her confident sartorial persuasion too, something that’s been noted by fashion designers and stylists in recent years. “I’ve always loved fashion,” she says, defining her own style as eclectic. “You can be characterful, chameleonesque and you wear your emotions on your body. I can go from tomboy to Grace Kelly in an afternoon! I hate shopping, but I know what I like. I have a hawk eye and can see it a mile away.”

Fashion then, as an extension of her vocation, is something she has embraced. “I was brought up that you dress for your host, or wherever you go you make an effort, and I think if you’re an actress and you get to walk the red carpet and you get to dress up you should really go for it. I like that there’s this romance of Hollywood glamour and playing with that. It’s part of my job that’s really fun.”

Right now, in the midst of “Mummy promo land”, as Wallis quips, she’s enjoying the chance to swap costumes for her own wardrobe after a gruelling eight months of shooting. Long hours, extreme physical exertion and the sheer scale of working on a set with a crew of 900 was taxing. “You are a level of exhaustion that’s pretty intense, you have to come back down to earth and slow right down,” she says.

Soon she will head to Paris for her next film, Colette, with Keira Knightley – based on the life of the French author of Gigi, so she’s making the most of her down time.

“I need a lot of alone time and to decompress,” she says of how she recovers, adding that she’s also using the breather as a chance rediscover her other passions, among them rock-climbing, hiking and paddle-boarding, reading, photography, art and travel. “Travel is where I stretch myself as an artist, as cheesy as that sounds. It’s where I go into the world and I’m a real person and put myself in environments that are uncomfortable, where I’m really living and breathing the world. If I’m going to tell stories and represent people in what I do, I have to be out there seeing things,” she says.

Given Wallis’s rapidly ascending profile, though, it may only be in the more remote corners of the globe that she could possibly lose herself in the crowd.