‘I love the company of alpha men': Hayley Atwell on working with Tom Cruise
One might assume, as a woman in Hollywood, that Hayley Atwell is sick of being asked about Mission: Impossible co-star Tom Cruise, who she's worked with now for over five years. But when the inevitable question is asked, she seems genuinely fond of him, at least from what I can glean from our Zoom interview (her camera remains firmly off for the entirety). 'I think I've taught him over time that I'm a friend to him,' she says, a smile creeping into her voice.
'He's met my family, and I've met his, and he creates a really wholesome environment for his actors to work in … he values me as a friend and I think that comes from my respect for him as a person. He is a very mild-mannered, polite gentleman, in that old-school Hollywood way. Kind of like Paul Newman for me.'
Atwell is speaking from her home city of London, and her voice is hoarse – she's just wrapped the marathon run of a West End production of Much Ado About Nothing, playing Beatrice to Tom Hiddleston's Benedick – and she speaks with a slight lisp not apparent on screen. But Atwell, 43, isn't here to talk about theatre. She's here to talk about Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the second instalment of the latest reboot of the action franchise.
It was in the first instalment, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, released in 2023, that audiences met Atwell's character Grace, a free-spirited pickpocket eventually persuaded by Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) to join the Impossible Missions Force.
Both Mission: Impossible and the action-spy genre at large have historically had a fraught relationship with their female characters, who are often relegated to stale stereotypes like the damsel in distress or sex symbol. As Grace, Atwell is cunning, gutsy and utterly captivating – not unlike the actor herself. With a wardrobe heavy on pantsuits and notably lacking in ballgowns, Grace is never a damsel and only occasionally distressed.
'I would consider myself an alpha woman,' she says. 'I've always been very strong. I've always had a very strong sense of who I am. I can't even work out how to get into the beginnings of why that is. It's just partly how I'm built.'
This self-given moniker, 'alpha woman', is fitting for someone who's maintained both a steady professionalism and fierce outspokenness throughout her career. Atwell has been particularly vocal about the pressures young women in Hollywood face to look a certain way – including a remark about her weight on the set of Brideshead Revisited which was initially attributed to producer Harvey Weinstein but which she has since said was made by someone from the crew.
Certainly, it seems this headstrong spirit is what drew Cruise (who is also a producer on the Mission: Impossible franchise) and director Christopher McQuarrie (who Atwell refers to affectionately as 'McQ') to cast her. 'I love the company of alpha men,' says Atwell, citing a number of 'alphas' she's worked with previously, including Sir Ian McKellan and Sir Simon Russell Beale. 'From the moment I met Tom and McQ, I discovered they also really love and value strong women.'
Atwell praises the freedom the pair, who are known for letting actors improvise, gave her to make Grace her own. 'I find it very exciting because with Mission, if I didn't come up with any ideas on any given day, then I would appear in the scenes as just another brunette. It really was up to me to keep moving forward and keep pushing, and keep being present to Tom.'
Like Cruise, notorious for his determination to perform his own stunts, however dangerous, Atwell was equally game for the physical challenges the role demanded. But it's the quiet moments, away from the high-octane car chases and scuba diving in freezing water, that really stick with her.
She recounts a particularly emotional moment while shooting The Final Reckoning in Svalbard, an archipelago situated between Norway and the North Pole. 'There was this incredible sight of a polar bear walking very slowly, calmly towards our ship. It looked well fed, thankfully, but we were very aware that we were in its territory. So there was this sense of absolutely respecting its space and its privacy. We were able to experience this mighty beast in its home. It was very awe-inspiring.'
Atwell grew up in London where she was raised by single mother, Allison Cain, a motivational speaker. They didn't grow up with money, but she says her childhood, surrounded by the beating heart of London's arts scene, was a happy one. Her father Grant, an American photographer, stayed in the picture, taking his daughter travelling during a gap year after high school.
While she says her hunger to perform started young, she almost didn't pursue acting. Atwell received a conditional offer to study philosophy and theology at Oxford University, but purposely flunked her final exams – something she doesn't regret to this day.
Acting has brought her into contact with all manner of people – from archbishops to scholars – who more than satisfy her curious spirit. 'It means that I'm immediately collaborating with them for a specific reason that fuels my own creativity rather than studying what they have to say from an academic point of view. I feel like I am a student every single day, and I'll never graduate.'
After finishing her studies at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2005, Atwell started her career in theatre before making the transition to the screen with a breakout role in Woody Allen's 2007 film Cassandra's Dream (in 2018, Atwell spoke out about her poor on-set relationship with Allen, vowing never to work with him again).
A series of roles in films including Brideshead Revisited and The Duchess followed, earning Atwell the title 'queen of period drama'. Her recent appearance in Mission: Impossible, alongside a recurring role as Agent Peggy Carter in the Marvel cinematic universe, might lead audiences to add action star to period-drama heroine.
But a closer look at her CV reveals a genre-defying career, including an emotional role in an episode of the sci-fi series Black Mirror and a guest appearance on another UK TV series, Heartstopper, she's particularly passionate about. 'There were a couple of lines in the script where I just felt like: 'Yes, I want to say those lines. That feels like a beautiful moment and I would like to experience that with that actor in that show.''
Throughout her career, Atwell has remained fiercely protective of her personal life. She became engaged to music producer Ned Wolfgang Kelly in 2023 and gave birth to their child last year – two milestones she has little interest in discussing, except to say she remains 'stubbornly myself, and very close to my family and friends from childhood'.
Despite her private nature, Atwell is fond of talking about self-love and its power in an industry known to be particularly cruel to women. In a recent appearance on the podcast Reign with Josh Smith, she commented on this perception, referring to a journalist who once wrote 'Hayley Atwell comes across like a self-help book'.
I ask her how she maintains such hope and optimism. 'If someone was cruel to me, that doesn't mean I have to be cruel back. When I walk into a room, particularly a working environment, I go, 'It's my responsibility how I show up and what I partake in and what I comment on.' And if someone gossips, it's my responsibility to not gossip back. The minute I do, I'm part of the problem.
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'I understand that as a deep sense of individual responsibility to shape the conversation I'm having. I want it to come from a place of professionalism, kindness and belief in what art can do to bring us together, to unite us and to help us understand differences. But there are also many things that are beyond my control and I really understand what's not within my power.'
If Atwell has earned the trust and ear of Cruise as both co-star and friend, then being in the orbit of one of the best-known men in Hollywood has dramatically shifted her relationship with fame. Or, rather, her distaste for it. 'It's not my business what people think of me,' she says firmly. 'There's nothing I can do about it.
'Of course, that's the power of charismatic actors – you can feel what they feel. You'll certainly feel a connection to the stories they're telling. But we're talking about that going into delusion if there is an assumption that, because we've seen this person on the big screen, we have any right to have any sort of relationship with them in real life.'
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Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
I'm 38 and a public figure, but I've never been in a long-term relationship
This story is part of the August 17 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories. David Stevens is better known by his stage name, David the Medium. The 38-year-old clairvoyant and spiritual medium came out as gay in the early 2000s but has never had a long-term relationship. Here, he talks about the important women in his life, especially his mum, Anne. My maternal grandmother, June, was like a second mother to me. She retired young due to health issues, which meant I spent a lot of time with her. We went on trips to Darwin together because she loved the hot weather – and crocodiles! She was a fun 'rocker' grandmother: her favourite artists were Kris Kristofferson and Jim Morrison. She also loved the TV series Angel, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off. She was very intuitive and also read tarot cards. My paternal grandmother, Rae, worked full-time in the 1960s and raised three kids. Her first child was stillborn and she was told to keep going and move on after such a traumatic event – very typical of that generation. Despite this sadness, she always had a sense of humour and was loving and protective. She passed away in 2018. My mum, Anne, is my best friend. We live in the same apartment complex in Port Melbourne and I see her every day. She was a stay-at-home mother when we were growing up, but once she split with Dad she went back into the workforce. She retired five years ago from a corporate administration role at a law firm. Mum gives good advice but she is also very matter-of-fact. My parents didn't have a great relationship and she was good at protecting us from that. My older brother, Aaron, and I are good people because of her upbringing. Mum said Dad put her off men. She hasn't re-partnered and is very independent. I have saved Mum's life three times. The first was 12 years ago. She had a lung infection that she ignored and which turned into pneumonia, then an internal infection. If I hadn't been there to call an ambulance, they told me she would have died. On Father's Day in 2019, Mum rang me to say she wasn't feeling well. I experienced a divine intervention telling me to go and see her. When I got to her place, she was lying in the bathroom after a heart attack. I called triple-0 and saw Mum lifting herself off the floor. She made a miraculous recovery. Then, two weeks later, she had a gall bladder infection. If I hadn't randomly visited her, she wouldn't have survived. We're energetically connected. Mum always said I was an intuitive child. She was supportive of me when I told her I was going from a career in legal administration to becoming a full-time medium. There was that motherly fear – 'Will he be OK?' – but she never stopped me.
Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Why Uma Thurman said no to action roles for two decades, and what brought her back
This story is part of the August 17 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories. There is something deliciously subversive about Uma Thurman. We are talking over Zoom, Thurman in the top-floor bedroom of her rural retreat just outside New York, wearing what looks like a gamekeeper's gilet, with no make-up and her hair unruly; gorgeous even when off-duty. 'You don't want to make a girl be obedient; it's not in her best interests,' she is saying, her voice patrician but her smile somehow naughty; it's in her eyes, too. We are talking about our daughters, both 13 and liable to barge in at any moment despite being told not to. 'It's kind of wonderful that they know the rules and don't always listen.' She could be talking about herself. Thurman – famous for her totemic performances in the Quentin Tarantino films Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Volume 2, as well as for movies like the Oscar-winning Dangerous Liaisons, the sci-fi Gattaca and Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac – likes to confound expectations. After Pulp Fiction, for which she was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe, she did not make a big-budget film for three years. And since making Kill Bill, in which she plays a vengeful assassin expertly schooled in martial arts, she has not wielded a sword on screen. Instead, she has spent the past two decades turning down action roles, doing rom-coms and contemporary drama and appearing on Broadway. 'I did anything but, many times,' she says. 'I didn't grind out a whole bunch of follow-up action movies because I felt I had done something significant in the field. And it was fun to not overplay it,' she says with a smile. 'But at the same time I can't stay out of it forever.' And so we now have two opportunities to see Thurman kick butt once again. In fact, towards the end of the new Netflix film The Old Guard 2, there is a scene that will have a certain sort of cineaste very excited indeed. Thurman, who plays a jaded 5000-year-old immortal called Discord, has an epic sword fight in front of a secret nuclear facility with her fellow immortal, Andromache, played by Charlize Theron – also a co-producer of the film and its predecessor. 'Andy' is a Scythian warrior whose preferred weapon is a hefty axe. It's Kill Bill' s bloody Bride versus Mad Max' s Imperator Furiosa, two icons of female vengeance and power, a fever dream of steel on steel. And even though it has been more than 20 years, Thurman, now 55, hasn't forgotten all her moves. 'Thank God for that, because I signed on quite late for this project so I didn't have time to do proper training,' she says. 'Fortunately I had put in hundreds of hours learning how to hold a sword.' For the two Kill Bill films, Thurman trained for eight hours a day for three months. 'You may not be limber and strong,' she continues, 'but if your brain has learnt how to memorise sequences of movements, you can get back in that zone.' The film, which is based on a comic book, is essentially about a band of age-old warriors using their supernatural powers to assist their less-gifted fellow humans. Theron's Andy is their leader, and both the original and the sequel were directed by women, Gina Prince-Bythewood and Victoria Mahoney respectively. 'With The Old Guard, I thought that first movie was really unusual, a superb female-led action film that had depth, drama and really beautiful, naturalistic acting,' Thurman says. Another draw was the opportunity to work with Theron. 'Charlize is a miraculous performer, a very powerful individual and as charismatic in person as on screen. And I liked the idea of playing a supporting role to another actress who I thought had done really significant work in the drama/action field.' Likewise, Theron had long wanted to cross swords with Thurman. 'I have always admired Uma from afar,' she reveals via email. 'From Dangerous Liaisons to Kill Bill, her work is a masterclass in finding the micro in characters. She knows exactly how to change her cadence in a second to convey something so intimate, so subtle, just out of nowhere. In moments I got so lost watching her in scenes we had together that I had to remind myself I was in the scene with her. She's that captivating! I love her curiosity. Her willingness to switch things on the spot. And her truly good nature. She is kind to the bone.' Thurman's other big project this year is Dexter: Resurrection, a reboot of the celebrated mid-noughties TV series Dexter about a serial killer with a moral compass. In this new season, Michael C. Hall returns in the titular role, while Thurman plays the head of security to a billionaire, played by Peter Dinklage, who is so obsessed with serial killers that he hosts a sort of psychopaths' convention in his fancy mansion. In the second episode we see Thurman's character about to do away with an errant serial killer with a nail-studded baseball bat. 'It has a real black humour to it, but it takes itself seriously enough that it doesn't take the bite out of the blackness,' she says. Thurman was 24 when she appeared in Pulp Fiction. She played Mia Wallace, the wife of a crime boss. She danced barefoot with John Travolta's character, Vincent Vega, overdosed on heroin, was brought around by a shot of adrenaline to the heart and became a cultural icon: her black-fringed bob and monochrome wardrobe a defining 1990s aesthetic. Thurman says she didn't realise the film would have such an impact while she was making it. 'I knew it was special, you could tell from the writing, the uniqueness, but it was a relatively small film.' And by this point she had been working as an actress for nearly a decade. Thurman's childhood defied conventions. Her father, Robert Thurman, is one of the world's foremost professors of Tibetan Buddhism, having been ordained as a monk by the Dalai Lama in 1965. In 1967 he married the German-Swedish model turned psychotherapist Nena von Schlebrügge, who had been previously married to the LSD guru Timothy Leary. The pair bought some land in Massachusetts, built a house and raised their four children, three boys and Uma, although there were occasional stints in India. 'I didn't really understand that I was an American until I was about 13,' Thurman says. 'I was raised by a very European woman, so it was kind of late news to me that I wasn't really a Swedish girl.' Both of her parents were extraordinary in their own ways. 'My mother had a very eventful life. She was discovered by [British photographer] Norman Parkinson in a schoolyard in Stockholm when she was 13. He took a test photo of her and gave her his card. Two years later, when she was 15 or 16, she took off, rang him up and became a model.' So when Thurman, aged 15, her parents on sabbatical in Japan, decided to leave her boarding school to go to New York, by herself, to pursue an acting career, her parents did not try to stop her. 'I knew very clearly that I was going to be an actress and I very much wanted to go out on my own,' she says. 'Both my parents did the same sort of thing when they were young. They were very independent. So I think there was a certain amount of being raised to be independent.' Today Thurman has her own family. There are her children from her second marriage to her Gattaca co-star Ethan Hawke: Maya Hawke, 27, and Levon Hawke, 23, both in the family business. (Thurman's first marriage, to Gary Oldman, was brief and tempestuous; she was 19 and he was 31, and they divorced in 1992.) The father of Thurman's 13-year-old, Luna, is the financier Arpad 'Arki' Busson, with whom Thurman had a relationship between 2007 and 2014. As a mother she finds the freedoms she was given as a teenage girl 'mind-boggling. I mean, it's unimaginable. Those were different times.' Aged 15, she was making her own money, finding her way around the city, going to auditions, 'with just a Filofax and a quarter in case I got lost and needed to call someone'. She did some modelling to help pay for acting classes, appearing on the cover of British Vogue in 1985, travelling to Europe for work. Thurman says this period was both scary and exciting. 'It was very much navigating an adult world, so there was a lot of pretending to be older.' Aged 17, she was cast in Terry Gilliam's film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as the goddess Venus, emerging naked from an enormous clamshell, her husband, the uxorious Vulcan, played by Oliver Reed. 'That really turned the dial for me,' she says. 'Before that, a part of me didn't know whether it would all be a dead end, as a good Swede is likely to tell you. It was at that moment I realised that I wasn't going back to school. Seeing a great director on a mad project, it was the moment I saw that I was truly on my path.' The path was never direct. Thurman's approach has always been to jump between genres, to take on odd projects, like Gus Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, rather than obvious ones, like The Lord of the Rings. This was in part because she did not have formal training as an actor and so saw each project as an opportunity to learn. 'I kept finding different, unique projects that would really require me to stretch. And from that kind of elasticity, that's how I helped myself grow.' Loading I ask what advice she has given to her daughter Maya. 'Oh, she knows what she's doing. She went to [the acting school] Juilliard, thank god. She actually finished high school. And what I did learn [about mothering] is that nobody listens. So it's really about being there for them rather than telling them what to do.' She has let Maya have free range in her wardrobe, ransacking it for the Nineties classics; Thurman was famously the first person to wear Prada to the Oscars. 'There's very little left of it; she's done a good job,' she says, not seeming to mind. 'I don't spend a lot of my everyday life dressing up.' After almost three decades of parenting, with her youngest now a teenager, Thurman is reaching what she calls her 'sunset period' of mothering. 'It's beautiful and there's not that much time left in the day,' she says. She is starting to think about what comes next, when she doesn't have to invest so much energy in 'shopping and driving and emailing teachers and all the things we do'. She has always had an ambition to direct, but that is for when she has more time. For now she's still just trying to fit it all in: work, parenting, looking after herself. To relax she does yoga and Pilates, goes for walks, cooks. She used to be a big reader of non-fiction but no more. 'Now non-fiction is just too brutal,' she says. I ask what she does read. 'Oh, the world has driven me to romantasy. Really, really teenage stuff. It's a great alternative to the newspapers right now.' Does she have any recommendations? 'I can't tell you. It will make me blush,' she says, smiling, delighted, it seems, to continue to defy expectations. The Sunday Times/The Times UK
The Age
a day ago
- The Age
Why Uma Thurman said no to action roles for two decades, and what brought her back
This story is part of the August 17 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories. There is something deliciously subversive about Uma Thurman. We are talking over Zoom, Thurman in the top-floor bedroom of her rural retreat just outside New York, wearing what looks like a gamekeeper's gilet, with no make-up and her hair unruly; gorgeous even when off-duty. 'You don't want to make a girl be obedient; it's not in her best interests,' she is saying, her voice patrician but her smile somehow naughty; it's in her eyes, too. We are talking about our daughters, both 13 and liable to barge in at any moment despite being told not to. 'It's kind of wonderful that they know the rules and don't always listen.' She could be talking about herself. Thurman – famous for her totemic performances in the Quentin Tarantino films Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Volume 2, as well as for movies like the Oscar-winning Dangerous Liaisons, the sci-fi Gattaca and Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac – likes to confound expectations. After Pulp Fiction, for which she was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe, she did not make a big-budget film for three years. And since making Kill Bill, in which she plays a vengeful assassin expertly schooled in martial arts, she has not wielded a sword on screen. Instead, she has spent the past two decades turning down action roles, doing rom-coms and contemporary drama and appearing on Broadway. 'I did anything but, many times,' she says. 'I didn't grind out a whole bunch of follow-up action movies because I felt I had done something significant in the field. And it was fun to not overplay it,' she says with a smile. 'But at the same time I can't stay out of it forever.' And so we now have two opportunities to see Thurman kick butt once again. In fact, towards the end of the new Netflix film The Old Guard 2, there is a scene that will have a certain sort of cineaste very excited indeed. Thurman, who plays a jaded 5000-year-old immortal called Discord, has an epic sword fight in front of a secret nuclear facility with her fellow immortal, Andromache, played by Charlize Theron – also a co-producer of the film and its predecessor. 'Andy' is a Scythian warrior whose preferred weapon is a hefty axe. It's Kill Bill' s bloody Bride versus Mad Max' s Imperator Furiosa, two icons of female vengeance and power, a fever dream of steel on steel. And even though it has been more than 20 years, Thurman, now 55, hasn't forgotten all her moves. 'Thank God for that, because I signed on quite late for this project so I didn't have time to do proper training,' she says. 'Fortunately I had put in hundreds of hours learning how to hold a sword.' For the two Kill Bill films, Thurman trained for eight hours a day for three months. 'You may not be limber and strong,' she continues, 'but if your brain has learnt how to memorise sequences of movements, you can get back in that zone.' The film, which is based on a comic book, is essentially about a band of age-old warriors using their supernatural powers to assist their less-gifted fellow humans. Theron's Andy is their leader, and both the original and the sequel were directed by women, Gina Prince-Bythewood and Victoria Mahoney respectively. 'With The Old Guard, I thought that first movie was really unusual, a superb female-led action film that had depth, drama and really beautiful, naturalistic acting,' Thurman says. Another draw was the opportunity to work with Theron. 'Charlize is a miraculous performer, a very powerful individual and as charismatic in person as on screen. And I liked the idea of playing a supporting role to another actress who I thought had done really significant work in the drama/action field.' Likewise, Theron had long wanted to cross swords with Thurman. 'I have always admired Uma from afar,' she reveals via email. 'From Dangerous Liaisons to Kill Bill, her work is a masterclass in finding the micro in characters. She knows exactly how to change her cadence in a second to convey something so intimate, so subtle, just out of nowhere. In moments I got so lost watching her in scenes we had together that I had to remind myself I was in the scene with her. She's that captivating! I love her curiosity. Her willingness to switch things on the spot. And her truly good nature. She is kind to the bone.' Thurman's other big project this year is Dexter: Resurrection, a reboot of the celebrated mid-noughties TV series Dexter about a serial killer with a moral compass. In this new season, Michael C. Hall returns in the titular role, while Thurman plays the head of security to a billionaire, played by Peter Dinklage, who is so obsessed with serial killers that he hosts a sort of psychopaths' convention in his fancy mansion. In the second episode we see Thurman's character about to do away with an errant serial killer with a nail-studded baseball bat. 'It has a real black humour to it, but it takes itself seriously enough that it doesn't take the bite out of the blackness,' she says. Thurman was 24 when she appeared in Pulp Fiction. She played Mia Wallace, the wife of a crime boss. She danced barefoot with John Travolta's character, Vincent Vega, overdosed on heroin, was brought around by a shot of adrenaline to the heart and became a cultural icon: her black-fringed bob and monochrome wardrobe a defining 1990s aesthetic. Thurman says she didn't realise the film would have such an impact while she was making it. 'I knew it was special, you could tell from the writing, the uniqueness, but it was a relatively small film.' And by this point she had been working as an actress for nearly a decade. Thurman's childhood defied conventions. Her father, Robert Thurman, is one of the world's foremost professors of Tibetan Buddhism, having been ordained as a monk by the Dalai Lama in 1965. In 1967 he married the German-Swedish model turned psychotherapist Nena von Schlebrügge, who had been previously married to the LSD guru Timothy Leary. The pair bought some land in Massachusetts, built a house and raised their four children, three boys and Uma, although there were occasional stints in India. 'I didn't really understand that I was an American until I was about 13,' Thurman says. 'I was raised by a very European woman, so it was kind of late news to me that I wasn't really a Swedish girl.' Both of her parents were extraordinary in their own ways. 'My mother had a very eventful life. She was discovered by [British photographer] Norman Parkinson in a schoolyard in Stockholm when she was 13. He took a test photo of her and gave her his card. Two years later, when she was 15 or 16, she took off, rang him up and became a model.' So when Thurman, aged 15, her parents on sabbatical in Japan, decided to leave her boarding school to go to New York, by herself, to pursue an acting career, her parents did not try to stop her. 'I knew very clearly that I was going to be an actress and I very much wanted to go out on my own,' she says. 'Both my parents did the same sort of thing when they were young. They were very independent. So I think there was a certain amount of being raised to be independent.' Today Thurman has her own family. There are her children from her second marriage to her Gattaca co-star Ethan Hawke: Maya Hawke, 27, and Levon Hawke, 23, both in the family business. (Thurman's first marriage, to Gary Oldman, was brief and tempestuous; she was 19 and he was 31, and they divorced in 1992.) The father of Thurman's 13-year-old, Luna, is the financier Arpad 'Arki' Busson, with whom Thurman had a relationship between 2007 and 2014. As a mother she finds the freedoms she was given as a teenage girl 'mind-boggling. I mean, it's unimaginable. Those were different times.' Aged 15, she was making her own money, finding her way around the city, going to auditions, 'with just a Filofax and a quarter in case I got lost and needed to call someone'. She did some modelling to help pay for acting classes, appearing on the cover of British Vogue in 1985, travelling to Europe for work. Thurman says this period was both scary and exciting. 'It was very much navigating an adult world, so there was a lot of pretending to be older.' Aged 17, she was cast in Terry Gilliam's film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as the goddess Venus, emerging naked from an enormous clamshell, her husband, the uxorious Vulcan, played by Oliver Reed. 'That really turned the dial for me,' she says. 'Before that, a part of me didn't know whether it would all be a dead end, as a good Swede is likely to tell you. It was at that moment I realised that I wasn't going back to school. Seeing a great director on a mad project, it was the moment I saw that I was truly on my path.' The path was never direct. Thurman's approach has always been to jump between genres, to take on odd projects, like Gus Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, rather than obvious ones, like The Lord of the Rings. This was in part because she did not have formal training as an actor and so saw each project as an opportunity to learn. 'I kept finding different, unique projects that would really require me to stretch. And from that kind of elasticity, that's how I helped myself grow.' Loading I ask what advice she has given to her daughter Maya. 'Oh, she knows what she's doing. She went to [the acting school] Juilliard, thank god. She actually finished high school. And what I did learn [about mothering] is that nobody listens. So it's really about being there for them rather than telling them what to do.' She has let Maya have free range in her wardrobe, ransacking it for the Nineties classics; Thurman was famously the first person to wear Prada to the Oscars. 'There's very little left of it; she's done a good job,' she says, not seeming to mind. 'I don't spend a lot of my everyday life dressing up.' After almost three decades of parenting, with her youngest now a teenager, Thurman is reaching what she calls her 'sunset period' of mothering. 'It's beautiful and there's not that much time left in the day,' she says. She is starting to think about what comes next, when she doesn't have to invest so much energy in 'shopping and driving and emailing teachers and all the things we do'. She has always had an ambition to direct, but that is for when she has more time. For now she's still just trying to fit it all in: work, parenting, looking after herself. To relax she does yoga and Pilates, goes for walks, cooks. She used to be a big reader of non-fiction but no more. 'Now non-fiction is just too brutal,' she says. I ask what she does read. 'Oh, the world has driven me to romantasy. Really, really teenage stuff. It's a great alternative to the newspapers right now.' Does she have any recommendations? 'I can't tell you. It will make me blush,' she says, smiling, delighted, it seems, to continue to defy expectations. The Sunday Times/The Times UK
