JESSICA YU LI HENWICK
FROM BULLWHIPS TO BULLET-TIME, THE ALL-ACTION STAR CAN DO IT ALL
IT’S A SAD FACT OF PANDEMIC life that some people just refuse to take precautions seriously. This is not, however, an accusation that can be levelled at Jessica Yu Li Henwick. The 28-year-old actor, who made a name for herself as whip-wielding warrior Nymeria Sand in Game Of Thrones, has learned there are ways to make even the most obstinate Covidiot get in line.
“I’d go out for my walks and take the bullwhip,” she jokes. “I’d be like, ‘There you go, that’s social distancing.’ It definitely encourages everyone to stand six feet back.”
Zooming horizontally with Empire from the supine comfort of her living-room sofa, the Surrey-born star is, quite literally, as laidback as they come. Henwick’s screen personas, on the other hand, have consistently adopted a more in-your-face attitude. She stared down Cthulhu in last year’s Underwater, knocked Iron Fist on his arse, and choked out Jerome Flynn’s Bronn with the aforementioned whip (“Would do it again — ten out of ten in terms of experience”). Her take-no-shit credentials are set to increase still further this December, when she’ll be seen diving into the cyber-fray alongside Keanu Reeves in The Matrix 4. “I haven’t seen a cut of the film, so I don’t know what’s in it and what isn’t, but I trained every day for months,” she says. “There are a couple of cast members who didn’t have any physical stuff and they were so sad. How can you be in The Matrix and not get to do any of the good stuff?”
Henwick does, it’s fair to say, make the good stuff look great. But despite her having already mastered the bullwhip (“Probably the most unusual thing I’ve ever had to do for a role”) and convincingly portrayed a cage fighter-cum-vigilante as dojo doyenne Colleen Wing in Iron Fist, Luke Cage and The Defenders, there can be few franchises so intrinsically geared towards making you look cool as The Matrix. “I grew up thinking Matrix was the coolest thing ever,” she remembers. “Bullettime, the multiple agents, the pills and the rabbit! When I signed on, I said the three things I want are a leather jacket, sunglasses and some wire work. I got two out of the three — I’ll leave you to guess which ones.”
Henwick hasn’t always been a vision of bloody knuckles and righteous fury. A bookish child with her face forever buried in pages, she once went to school with two backpacks: the first for her textbooks, and another to house the current doorstop-sized fantasy tome she couldn’t tear herself away from (“I would get bullied relentlessly”). All that changed when, at 18, she was cast as the lead in kids’ kung-fu series Spirit Warriors for the BBC — astonishingly, then the first East Asian actress to headline a British TV show. Henwick has, since then, woven in and out of genres, from comedic turns in The Thick Of It, to shadowing Maxine Peake in Peter Moffat’s QC chambers piece Silk. All before the stellar alignment of 2015 sent her hurtling skyward, combining her first appearance as one of Thrones’ Sand Snakes (last seen hanging from a bowsprit in Season 7) with a small but surprisingly impactful turn as X-wing pilot Jessika Pava in The Force Awakens — a role written specifically for Henwick by J.J. Abrams after she lost the part of Rey to Daisy Ridley. “It’s funny, my character has a whole life outside of the films,” she says. “She’s got her own book series, comic books. It’s pretty incredible.”
Currently busy shooting assassination thriller The Gray Man for the Russos, she’s also preparing to crack the whip off-camera, making her directorial debut with a short film for telecoms giant Xiaomi. Add to that Nancy Wu Done It, a teen detective drama she co-wrote and is developing for Amazon, and it’s abundantly clear that Henwick has spent precious little of the past year lying down.
“I have so much energy!” she says. “And all these things are scratching different itches. I just wrote a new pilot and if that gets picked up, I’ll lock myself in the writers’ room and not act for six months. But right now, there’s no reason to choose. You can have it all!”
THE MATRIX 4 IS IN CINEMAS FROM 22 DECEMBER