Before meeting Hayley Atwell, I am shown to an empty dressing room down the corridor from where she is rehearsing in London for her upcoming role as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare’s comic tale of love and deception. The room is empty save for a jug of water, some makeup and hairdressing equipment and, on the floor, a wonderfully garish pair of red patent leather platform shoes.
Atwell will be wearing them as Beatrice, who she plays opposite Tom Hiddleston’s Benedick. “They’re my dancing shoes,” she says when she arrives. “Every morning at 11 the shoes go on and we dance [as part of rehearsal for the show]. It’s expressive, it’s modern but not at all gimmicky.” It turns out dancing in front of an audience is a first for her. Is she out of her comfort zone? “Actually no. The giddy freeness of it is more in keeping with who I am. It’s certainly not like the period dramas I’ve done, or all the serious stuff. People tell me all the time: ‘You’re so much funnier than I realised.’ I suppose it’s nice when people underestimate you in that way because it doesn’t take much to impress them.”
It is hard to imagine anyone underestimating Atwell’s professional skills. After 20 years in the business, the actor – who is 42 – has proved herself a remarkable all-rounder, equally comfortable on the stage in a Jacobean tragedy (Women Beware Women), in TV costume dramas (Mansfield Park, Howards End, Brideshead Revisited), leading a Marvel series (Agent Carter), or dangling over a cliff in an upturned train carriage in an action franchise (Mission: Impossible). While being admitted into the Marvel universe shifted her career up a gear – Atwell made her entrance as Agent Carter in 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger before starring in the TV spin-off – it is Mission: Impossible, where she co-stars with Tom Cruise, that has thrust her into Hollywood’s big league.
As Atwell’s star has risen, she has increasingly set boundaries when talking to journalists. Though she is never less than polite, I begin to wonder if the sculptural, knuckle duster-style ring she wears across two fingers is there as a warning to interviewers lest they get too nosy. While she will happily chat about current projects and the intricacies of performance, she is less keen on digging into the past, resisting what she calls the “narrative” that can develop around actors, by which she means the oft-repeated stories from earlier in their careers. “I always think of that Joan Didion quote: ‘I have already lost contact with a couple of people I used to be,’” she explains. “There’s often this narrative that, even if respectful and accurate to different times [of life], is quite reductive.”
Family is also off limits, which I discover when I ask if Much Ado is her first job since having a baby last year (her partner is music producer Ned Wolfgang Kelly). “Who said I had a baby?” she asks, giving me a look. The Daily Mail, I say, when it ran photographs of her lifting her baby into a pram. Quite reasonably, this elicits a sigh. “The funny thing about the Daily Mail,” Atwell reflects, “is that it represents the base way we treat our artists. To be a woman followed by a man who is a stranger and who is hiding in a bush taking pictures of you without your knowledge, let alone consent, and selling it to a publication that pays to expose you … I know that I’m meant to just go: ‘OK, well, I asked for it [in this job].’ But it will never be OK with me.”
As for talking about new motherhood, she continues: “I can’t go there on something that’s just too precious. And I’ve learned that to speak for anyone in my personal life that hasn’t chosen a life in the public eye, it does them a disservice.”
Back to theatre, then, which is Atwell’s first love, professionally speaking. “I love that you come in every day and you’ve got your script under your arm and a coffee, and you’re in the West End where there is this immediate feeling of a theatre community,” she says. “Theatre does for me what church can do for many people. I still really feel that.” The first thing she asked Much Ado’s director Jamie Lloyd – who cast her in 2011’s The Faith Machine and 2013’s The Pride – when he suggested she play Beatrice was: “Exactly how [traditionally] ‘Hey nonny nonny’ is it going to be?”
Once he’d explained that sort of thing wasn’t his style, she was all in. She loves the play for its comedy but also for the complexities of Beatrice who is independent, upbeat and engaged in a “merry war” of wits with Benedick. “At one point, her uncle says he’s heard that she can have a nightmare and still wake up laughing,” Atwell says. “And I think there is so much sadness in that, because everyone around her thinks: ‘Oh, she’s so fun, you don’t have to worry about her.’ But she’s been so hurt that humour has become her coping mechanism and her armour.”
Atwell’s lengthy break from the stage has coincided with her tenure on Mission: Impossible, where she plays Grace, the light-fingered, morally ambiguous heroine drawn into Ethan Hunt’s latest mission. The franchise has, she says, been all-encompassing, even though the last film, Dead Reckoning Part One – described by critic Mark Kermode as a “genuinely breathtaking romp” – was delayed by Covid. The eighth film in the series, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning comes out this May, “which means I’ll have been working on Mission for five-and-a-half years, which for me is unheard of. I mean, thank God I loved it.”
Even now, they are still doing reshoots which involve “fleshing out scenes or changing things around. They’re always tinkering and looking to make things better. So even while [working on Much Ado], I can get a call at any time.” Working with Cruise has been a delight: “When I started, I was very aware of the rarefied air around him and how there is no one like him. And there never will be because actors aren’t made like him any more. He is a one-man studio and, to me, very kind, very professional. And because of that, I felt I was able to try lots of different things. There was never a risk of failure or being unsafe. Tom really likes people to thrive on set.”
You can see why Cruise and Atwell work well together: both have a fierce work ethic and take their art incredibly seriously. Unusually for an action movie, there is no script when Mission: Impossible starts shooting and improvisation is actively encouraged (it was Atwell’s idea that Grace should be a pickpocket). “There’ll be Tom going: ‘From five years old I’ve always wanted to jump from a cliff on a motorbike’, and realising his dream. But with the rest, they’re kind of making it up as they go. When I auditioned, they were clear they were looking for someone who likes to work in this way, and that it’s not for everyone. I also had to be prepared for five months of full-time physical training and to be dynamic enough to learn fight sequences, to drift in a car with Tom, to be able to shoot a gun and work with knives.” Can Atwell confirm that this is the last film in the franchise? She pauses. “I mean, look, they called it The Final Reckoning. On the other hand, ‘Tom Cruise’ and ‘final’ are oxymorons, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he goes: “Wait, maybe …’ Although he has so many things he is working on, so I can’t see how another Mission would fit into that.”
When Atwell was growing up, the acting seed was planted early. Her mother named her after the Whistle Down the Wind actor Hayley Mills and regularly took her to the theatre. A pivotal moment came when she saw Ralph Fiennes in Hamlet at east London’s Hackney Empire when she was 11 (she also lauds her friend Ben Whishaw’s Hamlet, specifically his “To be or not to be” speech, which she instructs me to watch on YouTube as a matter of urgency). Atwell’s parents divorced when she was little: her father, an American photographer and massage therapist, returned to Kansas where his daughter would spend her summer holidays; the rest of the time she lived with her mother in Ladbroke Grove, west London. She remembers at secondary school both her peers and teachers frequently asking her to read excerpts of books out loud. Previously a shy and introverted child, as a teen she wowed a school assembly reading a Puck monologue from A Midsummer Night’s Dream while wearing green leggings.
“The British side of me was all: ‘Oh God, that wasn’t cool at all.’ It wasn’t good to be passionate about anything at that age. But the American in me was all: ‘Oh my God, that was so great, I want to do it again.’ I loved the idea of being able to use language as a tool to make people feel something. I really felt that my intellect woke up.”
Beginning acting proper, Atwell decided she wanted to “do it all”, meaning she didn’t want to stay in theatre or be marooned on TV police procedurals. So she trained hard, enrolling at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama where she went deep into the nuts, bolts and philosophy of performance. “I knew that’s what it would take to have a craft and sustain it over an entire lifetime,” she explains. “It was something that needed rigorous practice, experience, respect, reverence to the craft.”
Emerging from drama school, she was “always confident. I never doubted myself although I did doubt the business. I’d see people around me who were incredibly talented [not working] and realise it’s often just down to luck who’s getting these roles. And that was liberating, because you think: ‘Well, I can only do my best, and there are all these other things I can’t control.’”
Atwell has spoken in the past about being told by a producer on the set of Brideshead Revisited to lose weight, which prompted her co-star Emma Thompson to leap to her defence and tell her: “You’re not a model, you’re an actor.” A decade ago, when she was playing Agent Carter, she also bemoaned being Photoshopped for the front cover of a German magazine. Today she observes “that thing” that women do of “filtering ourselves, or reducing ourselves to fit in or to people-please, partly because women don’t tend to be able to fail upwards in the way men do. But then comes that point where you go: ‘I’m really OK if I’m not liked.’ I think I’ve developed enough of an understanding of the business that I can stop worrying about that.”
It’s with clear satisfaction that she says she is now more experienced and has clout in the industry. “I can express a preference for things. I’m in a more creatively fertile place that’s less fear-based, and where failure is totally allowed. I’m not asking for permission from others to try new things, as I can give myself permission and I’ll own it if it doesn’t work.” Best of all, she notes, is that “I can say no, I won’t do that. It’s not for me.”
• Much Ado About Nothing is at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London, 10 February to 5 April.
