The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
The corset is coming off
After a decade playing restrained, demure types, actor Hayley Atwell is ready to cut loose
After a decade playing buttoned-up roles, actor Hayley Atwell tells Guy Kelly she can’t wait to cut loose and surprise us all
Hayley Atwell has decided she needs to come out from under her wimple. ‘I’m going to dye my hair pink next month,’ she declares, when we meet for coffee at a hotel restaurant near London’s Covent Garden. A firm nod. ‘I’ve spent too long feeling quite nun-like. I want December to be the opposite.’ It is late on a Saturday morning and the place is heaving with lazy weekend breakfasters, fussing staff and guests killing time before checkout, but when Atwell arrives looking immaculate in a black turtleneck and tailored tartan trousers under a pastel-blue mackintosh, smile wide, skin luminous, heels my untrained eye identifies as covered in jewels, only a small handful of people break from buttering their toast to notice her.
Atwell’s lack of superstardom is puzzling, given the variety of work she has taken on in the 13 years since she left drama school, but it’s also testament to her effectiveness as an actor. Between the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which she played secret agent Peggy Carter over multiple superhero films and a television series, her lead role as Margaret Schlegel in last year’s BBC adaptation of Howards End, and dozens of other fine screen performances and stage turns, almost everybody will have seen Atwell in something. But maybe they don’t know it.
I last saw her 12 hours earlier, under her wimple. For the past two months, Atwell has been playing the role – or roles, rather – of Isabella in a high-concept, prescient production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure at the Donmar Warehouse.
Directed by Josie Rourke, the play is performed twice. The first is set in 1604, where Angelo, played by Jack Lowden (Dunkirk, War & Peace), is given temporary charge of the city and exploits Isabella, a trainee nun, by offering to spare her brother’s life if she sleeps with him. After the interval the play is performed again, though this time in modern dress and with Isabella in charge, preying on the vulnerable Angelo. Does it feel any different when the genders are reversed? That’s the question, and according to the 70-somethings in the row behind me, the answer is ‘yes’.
‘Fantastic!’ says Atwell. ‘That’s the point: why does it feel different? Is it unconscious bias? Josie had the idea before #Metoo, but we didn’t think we could do it and not take in the current climate. We wanted to be provocative.’
There are lines in the play that could easily be said by men in power today – ‘Who will believe thee, Isabella?’ Angelo says, mockingly, at one point – though Atwell needed no reminder of how misogyny persists in the 21st century. Last year, it came to light that an unnamed film executive (not Harvey Weinstein, as was claimed) had demanded she lose weight, labelling her ‘a fat pig’ on the set of 2008’s Brideshead Revisited .Itledto her friend and co-star, Emma Thompson, threatening to leave the picture if Atwell was spoken to like that again. Rehearsals for Measure for Measure coincided with the US Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing into the allegation of attempted rape against the then-supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
‘All of us had been glued to it in our dressing rooms, so we discussed it, and what it meant for the production,’ Atwell says.
The experience of doing the play has been intense and frequently exhausting. Atwell left the theatre just before midnight. She will start another matinee in 90 minutes.
‘You have a comedown,’ she says. ‘These are difficult issues we’re covering, so afterwards I like to deal in the opposite. I get the Tube home, grab myself a fish-finger wrap from Leon, get into bed and watch Bake Off.’
Atwell is lively, engaging company. Over the past decade she has played a lot of buttoned-up, reserved types, yet at 36 she has no truck with coyness. She has a wicked cackle, and is quick to offer jokes at her own expense. She is an infamous onset prankster, having previously distributed T-shirts featuring an unflattering photograph of Dominic Cooper around a crew, and even filled a colleague’s dressing room with 2,400 plastic balls she bought on ebay.
What has Lowden had to endure, I wonder? ‘It’s mainly telling him people are in the audience that aren’t. I told him Kylie was in the other night. He spent the whole evening scanning for her…’ That cackle.
We’re meeting to talk about Atwell’s next project, a three-part adaptation of Andrea Levy’s Walter Scott Prize-winning novel The Long Song for the BBC. Set in the final days of slavery in 19th-century Jamaica, it tells the story of a slave girl, July (played by Tamara Lawrance), who lives on a plantation and waits on Atwell’s Caroline Mortimer, the repugnant wife of the owner. After an uprising, Caroline is left in charge until a handsome, seemingly progressive new overseer, Robert Goodwin (Atwell’s Measure for Measure partner Jack Lowden again), arrives. Like the novel, the story is told from the perspective of July as an elderly woman, and its tone is unusual. It is a tale filled with humour, love and hope, but scenes of farce sit alongside acts of horror.
‘It’s not what you expect, is it? When I first read it I thought, “Oh God, I do not know how to play that role.” I felt very uncom-
‘A woman can’t be “enigmatic” – they’d be deemed bitchy’
fortable. I didn’t know how to do it without being a panto villain.’
She more than pulls it off, excelling at the comedy and bringing nuance to a potential caricature. Reviews of Atwell often remark on her ability to maintain an air of spontaneity beneath a script, never seeming mannered.
‘We see Caroline go from hysterical and petulant to a woman of her time. She knows the slaves are much brighter than her, and she’s terrified. The challenge was discovering if there was a way of showing the psychological damage done to someone when they inflict horror.’
The Long Song was filmed on a working sugar-cane plantation over two sweltering months in the Dominican Republic. Atwell was in a corset. When she was first being laced into one at drama school, she ‘loved what it did to my posture and shape’. She may now have reached her limit. ‘Being on a hot set, the time it takes to get into it and what the heat does, especially after a big lunch… I think this is the end of corsets for me,’ she says.
The shoot allowed Lowden and Atwell to meet and form a close bond ahead of Measure for Measure, and for the whole cast of The Long Song to become comfortable with one another. Many shared their family connections to slavery, including Sir Lenny Henry, who plays Godfrey, July’s fellow slave.
‘He’s such a legend,’ Atwell says. ‘There’s a scene where Caroline goes to hit Godfrey, and we were sitting waiting for the lights to be set up, and I said to him, “You know, you were a massive part of my childhood. You meant a lot to my family.” He went, “Oh God, why did you say that now!” But it’s true, I think he was important to a lot of households in the 1980s and ’90s.’
Atwell was brought up in Ladbroke Grove, west London, the only child of Grant Atwell and Allison Cain, bohemian motivational speakers who separated when she was two. Grant – now a photographer-turned-shaman who also goes by his Native American name, Star Touches Earth – returned to America, leaving Atwell’s mother to bring her up on her own.
It was an unusual childhood. Vegetarian at eight, walking over hot coals with her father at nine, political rallies... Atwell has previously compared her relationship with her mother to that of Edina and Saffy in Absolutely Fabulous. ‘That’s actually a bit reductive to Mum. She’s not all, “Dahhhling, Bolly!” She taught me to be curious and confident, to ask questions and not be fearful of what I didn’t know.’
I t was peripatetic, too. Besides shuttling across the Atlantic to see her father, a bursary allowed Atwell to spend two years at Hill House – former pupils include the Prince of Wales and Jacob Rees-mogg – where she befriended royalty and went to play dates in mansions. By contrast, home was social housing, and when the money ran out she moved to a state Catholic school, rising to be head girl and deciding to become an actor.
‘I used to go to plays with my mum and vividly remember thinking it was magical that strangers can be on stage, the lights go down, and by the end you have an affinity with them.’
Her childhood helped her to be a chameleon, she reckons. She could have tea with the nephew of the Sultan of Brunei on one day, then dance to reggae at Notting Hill Carnival with friends the next.
Her mother still lives in Ladbroke Grove, in sight of Grenfell Tower, and volunteers with children affected by the fire. Atwell herself knew two people who lost their lives that night. She now promotes the Justice 4 grenfell campaign – co-run by her school friend Tasha Brade – to her 600,000 Instagram followers.
‘I feel fiercely protective over how people who come from social housing are depicted. Grenfell to me represented a microcosm of London. The injustice is institutional
classism and racism, how is this happening here? My mum and I were very affected.’
A single Pringles advert paid Atwell’s way through the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where she graduated with Jodie Whittaker. In 2007, her first film was a Woody Allen flop, Cassandra’s Dream. Atwell was grateful for the part at the time, but earlier this year expressed regret, saying she wouldn’t work with Allen again after the #Metoo movement prompted reasserted allegations of sexual abuse by his stepdaughter, Dylan Farrow.
‘I didn’t know back then what I know now. Would I work with him now? No,’ Atwell said, adding, ‘It’s exciting that I can say this now and know I’m not going to be blacklisted.’
Judging by her CV, Atwell’s formative years went well. She starred with her friend Keira Knightley in The Duchess; was nominated for an Olivier Award in 2010 for a West End revival of Arthur Miller’s 1950s drama A View from the Bridge; ended the decade using her ‘proactive American side’ to phone Annabel Jones, the co-creator of Emmywinning sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror, and ask for a role (Jones promptly cast her, telling her she wasn’t aware Atwell would be interested in something so contemporary); and played Peggy Carter in Marvel’s Captain America, which turned into her own TV series. But in fact she hated her 20s.
‘I never understood it when people said your 20s will be the best years of your life. I was scared of putting a foot wrong. I didn’t like parties, I didn’t like sitting around with a lot of other pretty women in designer outfits. I got very judgmental and envious about how fabulous a time they were all having.’
She was jealous, too, of her male peers, who didn’t seem to be affected by self-doubt. They would move around doing and saying what they liked, or they’d be described as ‘brooding’ or ‘roguish’.
‘It usually means they drink too much, they’re late for everything and they’re rude. A woman can’t be “enigmatic”, they’d be deemed bitchy. It’s much harder for women to relax into who they are and what they think in this industry. You have to navigate your way through with honesty, integrity, charm, kindness… it’s f—ing hard.’
She would look to older co-stars for guidance. Her friend Dame Emma Thompson deliberately offered Atwell no advice when she emailed to ask about taking on Margaret Schlegel in
Howards End – a role Thompson won an Oscar for in 1992. Instead, she simply told her not to watch any other adaptations, and believe ‘you are she, and she is you’.
Howards End was a turning point for Atwell. ‘It was the first time that I didn’t bring any neurosis or insecurity to what I was doing. I felt like a grown-up,’ she says. The work she looks for has changed, too. Working with Marvel was a positive experience (not least physically, as she’s kept up the interval training, swimming and running that was required to get in shape), but becoming a world-famous actress no longer seems a priority to her.
‘When I came out of drama school you looked up to the Rachel Weiszs and Kate Winslets of the world, the English roses, because the Americans loved that. For me now, my focus has shifted to people like Phoebe Waller-bridge [creator of Fleabag and Killing Eve], and Michaela Coel [a Bafta-winner for
Chewing Gum, which she wrote and starred in] – women who make their own work.’
The rise of women writing, directing and producing is the
‘It’s much harder for women to relax into who they are and what they think in this industry’
biggest change Atwell’s noticed in the industry in the past few years, and she wants to join them: she plans to start her own production company, tentatively called Kid About Town, and is keen to direct.
After The Long Song, she will be seen playing a teacher in Gurinder Chadha’s Blinded by the Light, a musical based on the memoir of journalist Sarfraz Manzoor, which she describes as ‘a beautiful love letter to Luton in the 1980s, set to music by Bruce Springsteen’. Beyond that, she has a clean slate. How about James Bond, I ask, for no real reason.
‘Do you know what? I was telling Jack recently how much I’d like to play Bond, but then he pointed out he’s an old, misogynistic character. It’d be a lot better to do a female equivalent, with a female narrative and characteristics, rather than a misogynist with boobs.’
So look forward to that. First, though, she has a visit from her beloved father. They speak almost daily, and earlier this year went to Disneyland together. Then she’ll have Christmas, when she plans to have lots of dinner parties and walk her ludicrously small dog, a chihuahua named Howard, in the park. A few months ago she bought a house in south-west London, where she lives with her boyfriend, a doctor she met at primary school. He goes unnamed, and will remain so for the moment.
‘He says, “If I don’t ever go on a red carpet, I would be delighted.” He’s not interested in the slightest. He’s a big advocate for the NHS, that’s his thing, but he’s not a partygoer at all.’
Neither is Atwell, as it happens. But remember: the wimple’s coming off, the corset’s going away, the hair’s turning pink. That cackle again. ‘About time too.’
The Long Song will be on BBC One in December