I can never get a zipper to close. Maybe that stands for something, what do you think?
Of course, you would expect the 30-year-old actress and vivacious screen beauty to be something of a minx in real life. A highly intelligent one, of course, but a minx nonetheless. There's something about her sense of sexual power on screen that makes this charismatic actress riveting to watch as she unfurls her tantalising half-smile. If you want an alluring but complex heroine, all honeyed skin and chestnut-hair, almond-eyed Hayley is your woman.
Unsurprisingly, given her current chain of thought, Atwell thinks it is a good thing she didn't have a sex scene with Chris Evans in 'Captain America: The First Avenger'. The brunette beauty says she found it "refreshing" and "innocent" that her character Peggy Carter did not go all the way with the 30-year-old star's superhero alter-ego in the 1940s-based film because it was more appropriate. "I really liked it that there was no sex scene in the script because I thought, 'That was very refreshing and innocent and how traditional.' I think it was more in-keeping with the time. I've got a romantic notion that in the 40s there were classy ladies who had built up their relationships with men and subtle flirtation would go on for weeks before the final deal was sealed. And I think that's more exciting because you're not giving as much away. I wanted the audience to come away and think, 'I think that couple did actually really love each other.'"
Which is not to say she didn't feel it was her duty to have a "bit of a grope" when Evans revealed his rock hard chest for the first time. Filming a scene whereby Peggy Carter has to brush her hand across his nipple - Atwell explains she literally just had an impulse to touch it to make sure it was real. "And let me tell you, it was real and pert and covered in oil and it looked extraordinary in person," she giggles. "I just instinctively grabbed his man boob, and Joe loved it, he was like, do that again! They kept it in the film. So we did a couple of takes of me being really inappropriate with my hand on his pec for the duration of the scene just to see how far we could go, and then it got a little bit over the top." Atwell says she is actually attracted to physiques that seem to be appropriate to what that person does. "So if you’re an athlete or a dancer or swimmer, than amazing, but if you’re huge and beefy, for me it becomes a real off-putting vanity that I find unattractive," she insists. "It’s an energy thing really – it’s how comfortable people are in their bodies and how they carry it and I find that overrides any kind of physical thing really."
Being at ease in her own skin is not something that has always come naturally to Hayley. "My real self, the self I have always been from a child, is a loner and nerd, slightly overweight, with a very heavy fringe," she told the Guardian. "That is who I was as a kid. I don't think I will ever be anything other than that. It is sheer delight when I see pictures of myself now because I think: that's not me. I was 'Hayley Fatwell' at school. I had the only-child syndrome of loving my independence to the point of being a bit socially retarded. I was on only child, very quiet and very shy, I was surrounded in primary school by skinny girls in crop tops, when I had puppy fat. I wasn't cool. I developed really early and couldn't quite fit into girls' clothes and felt crap. I think that served me well – I had to develop different parts of my personality."
In the eager openness of her face, it is easy to find the little girl that Atwell once was. She was an only child whose parents were motivational speakers who had met and fallen in love at a London workshop of Dale Carnegie’s self-help bible How to Win Friends and Influence People in the mid-1970s. By the time she was two, they had separated. Her father, Grant – 'a Tom Selleck lookalike’, and a photographer-turned-shaman who also goes by his Native American name, Star Touches Earth – returned to America, leaving his daughter and her mother, Alison, living like sisters in their bohemian enclave off Ladbroke Grove in west London.
It was no ordinary childhood. Aged eight, after seeing Loyd Grossman put a live lobster into boiling water, Atwell became a committed vegetarian. Aged nine, she walked over hot coals at a 'Power Into Action’ workshop her mother had taken her to. As a teenager, while her friends were out experimenting with alcohol and cigarettes, she was on anti-vivisection and Free the Dolphins marches. At the rare parties that she did go to, she was happiest in the corner – preferably with someone’s parent – having a long discussion about life, love and the universe.
At Sion-Manning, her comprehensive secondary school, Atwell rebelled against rebellion, taking the bookish route and excelling academically. It was not always easy, and she often found herself being bullied by fellow students for her New Age ways. 'I’d see kids fighting in the playground and say things like, "I’m sensing a lot of anger here",’ she laughs. After her GCSEs she moved to the fee-paying London Oratory, and then on to Guildhall, a happy outcome for the girl who had only ever wanted to be an actress.
Named after Hayley Mills, Atwell was exposed to film and theatre from a young age. "Mum wasn’t at all religious but she thought that going to the theatre was as important a ceremonial, communal experience that a person could have," she says. "She was always very moved by the power that it had to open your mind. I found it genuinely thrilling." A trip, aged 11, to see Ralph Fiennes – with whom she would later work on The Duchess – playing Hamlet was a particularly formative moment. A shy child, Atwell found that the only time she wasn’t terrified of speaking was when she was saying somebody else’s words, reading aloud in class or performing in a play. "From a very young age, stories fuelled my imagination in the most wonderful way," she says. She remembers spending many hours alone in her room recreating her favourite fairy stories. "Sometimes I would steal characters’ names from other stories and put them into mine. I felt very safe and very happy in those little worlds of my own."
She recognises that the woman she has grown into is a product of the child who could navigate any social situations she found herself in by putting on a mask. "When I was with my mother’s friends, I could talk fluently about Descartes. When I was with my father, I could do the New Age thing and immerse myself in ceremonies for dead spirits I had never met. When I was with my posh friends, I could be posh. When I was with my rougher friends, I could be totally street."
"Hayley is a real chameleon," says Saul Dibb, who cast her in her first television role as Catherine Fedden, the bipolar daughter of a corrupt Tory MP in the BBC adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty. "She can adapt to any situation with the most extraordinary ease. She is also a strong character who has the added bonus of being one of those magnetic characters that people just want to be near." Playing a manic-depressive who makes a habit of asking the socially unaskable questions, she managed to shock even that irrepressibly racy screenwriter Andrew Davies with her own direct approach. "He came on set and asked us if we had any questions about his script, so I asked if Catherine had ever had an orgasm, and I think it threw him – I'm a bit straight up," she laughs.
So impressed was Woody Allen by her performance as Catherine that he made her his new muse in his 2007 film Cassandra's Dream alongside Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell and gushed to the press about her beauty. "I wish I felt like his muse but I hardly felt he ever talked to me", comments Atwell, adding that when they did speak, his advice was minimal – her description of his working method shedding some light on the strangely anonymous nature of Allen's late-career output. "I'd say 'what am I doing here? Who is this girl?' and Woody was like 'Oh, you know, she's just a girl…' and I'd go 'right… OK'. It was an odd time, I was incredibly grateful for the experience and the doors that it opened to me and meeting someone like Woody. But I felt very rabbit-in-the-headlights."
Yet from that moment her career has taken on an unstoppable momentum. As a bewitching Julia Flyte in the Julian Jarrold's big-screen version of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel of class friction and forbidden love in interwar Britain, she had to compete with people's cherished memories of the multi-award-winning 1981 TV version. "I didn't watch the TV version as I didn't want to appear to be imitating anyone, but a man came over to me in a pub [during filming] and said I reminded him of his friend, Diana Quick, even though he didn't know what I did for a living," says Atwell. Evidently made for the role, the Londoner readily admits that "the director said I wasn't an immediate choice for Julia. It was partly because I really went for it in the audition and slapped Matthew [Goode, who plays Julia's lover Charles Ryder] really hard. The shock created that little bit of frisson between us that got me the part."
Atwell thinks the fact she, herself, went to church and attended a Catholic school growing up gives her "a sense of the Catholic guilt that's ingrained, especially within Julia at that time." Entering a bygone of waistcoats, white linen suits, and sybaritic afternoons spent punting at Oxford, she states, "I think the easiest thing for me was, I was walking into Castle Howard, which was being Brideshead, and also the clothes and the - even the hair. Everything was very grand, but also quite oppressive, quite daunting, very haunting. And so it was - it was just up to me to breathe into that world, and to inhabit that world." Breathing can be quite restricted when your generously proportioned breasts are oppressed by the tyranny of a 20s fashion which did not celebrate women's curves at all. "We had to tape down my bosom for Brideshead," she says with a wince, before announcing she loves the womanly curves she acquired at 17, when doctors advised her to put on weight to be fit enough to play her beloved full-contact rugby. "I felt imprisoned in those difficult costumes. It was the complete opposite, of course, for The Duchess," she grins.
Ah, Atwell and Keira Knightley sharing a Regency bed with Ralph Fiennes in the film adaptation of Amanda Foreman's biography of Princess Diana's 18th-century ancestor; the witty and attractive but hopelessly naive aristocrat, Georgiana Spencer. Set up and then trapped in an emotionally-distant, arranged marriage with callous but regal and powerful Duke of Devonshire William Cavendish, Hayley plays the duchess's best friend, a skilful power broker with mixed motives in a ménage à trois. She is also the duchess's sexual awakener in a scene that suggests a Sapphic attraction between the two. "I wouldn't be surprised if they had a lesbian relationship," says Hayley, "but we wanted to be delicate enough with it to just show an aspect of their relationship that wasn’t sexual. This was a time when homosexuals didn’t have a label, and I think marriage then – especially in the aristocracy – was based on more of a business deal than it was on love and passion. So, you were able to have your love affairs elsewhere, with women teaching women how to enjoy themselves and their bodies, sexually. It [the scene] was something that showed how beautiful their relationship was. But you could also say that it was partly Bess having a sexual power over Georgiana as well as other forms of power."
As for the Pavlovian comparisons with Keira, the hype-wary Hayley dismisses them in her direct way. "Keira and I are very different actors and very different human beings," she says. "She has this childlike, girly quality but also the incredibly tough skin of someone who has had an awful lot of press, whereas I can be quite geeky." It was, though, fascinating to be around her and to watch her work ethic, and how professional she is, thinks Atwell. "We spent a bit of time living together at a country house, and had hot country dinners together. And we were able to just get on as two young girls in their early 20s, and just hang out. And that was great, because that helped relieve some of the tension that was going on within the story, of what we were doing."
Next up were two Channel 4 adaptations of novels: William Boyd's Any Human Heart and Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. She is the love interest in each – though the characters are centuries apart. In The Pillars of the Earth, a quasi-religious 12th-century epic, she plays the dispossessed Aliena, determined to reclaim her father’s Earldom for her brother. Her father is arrested and hanged for treason, leaving her penniless. She’s then raped by William Hamleigh and his groom once they find out where she and her brother are hiding. But even though she struggles with the psychological aftermath, she never rests from pursuing her goal of restoring her brother to her father’s title. In five months, filming in Budapest, she had to see Aliena through 20 years from "princess to peasant to wool merchant to love interest to wife and mother". It was a "stretching exercise", she says, in which she had to "grow at speed".
Any Human Heart is epic too, though confined to the 20th century. Boyd described it as an "emotional, dramatic and rackety journey" through the "long and tumultuous life" of a writer, Logan Mountstuart. Hayley plays Freya, his second wife and the love of his life. "But he was the problem," she says. "Logan Mountstuart is a pathetic womaniser. How could I justify that? I needed Freya not to look like an idiot for going out with the wrong kind of man." That said, Hayley is unashamedly a man's woman. "I absolutely adore the company of men. I'd rather spend a weekend with guys than with girls – I'm more masculine that way," she admits. "Hayley is a star in the old-fashioned sense of the word,’ says author Boyd, "whose bombshell 1940s glamour is mesmerising."
Discussing the comparisons with old time movie stars, she nods: "Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's the square jaw. Stars in the old days used to be more angular. I think my face works on screen because there's a lot of angles to it." Atwell, as we have discovered, has been playing period beauties fairly solidly since graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. As well as Aliana, Freya, Julia, Bess and Peggy there was Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park and The Ruby in the Smoke's Rosa Garland. "Please God, no more red lipstick!" Hayley says, dropping her head into her hands in mock despair. When she looks up again, the beautiful mouth that is the source of so much frustration has split her face into a dimply grin. It is easy to see why it has generated so much attention; it is a megawatt sort of a mouth. Lauren Bacall had one, Hedy Lamarr had one, Cate Blanchett has one.
In her relatively short career, she has played her hand well; choosing the interesting roles and, most crucially, making the most of her porcelain good looks without ever cashing in on them. Much has been made of her voluptuous sensuality, and yet Atwell has never gratuitously revealed an inch of flesh. "In Cassandra's Dream I had a love scene with Ewan, so I said to myself, "I'm going to take myself seriously and wear a body stocking out of respect for Ewan's wife," she explains, "because my body was not going to be seen. And I wore control pants in Brideshead for the love scene with Matthew. Oh," she adds teasingly with – yes – a minxy grin, "I'm giving away all my secrets!" Well, maybe not all. In The Pillars of the Earth, for example, there was also the judicious employment of some rather anachronistic nipple pasties and a Middle Ages body-double for that nude pond swim; such are the technical logistics of the art of erotic suggestion. In terms of actresses working today, there can be no curvier body that promises so much but explicitly delivers so little.
Despite employing every trick of the trade, Atwell insists nude scenes can still be very liberating. "I feel very human," she says. "This is me, with all my little imperfections." If anything she seems even more acutely aware of others' feelings while filming sex scenes, rather than her own. She is, for example, protective for the wives and girlfriends of the actors with whom she is simulating love-making. "It's people's worst fantasy to see their partner kissing someone else, even though it's a job and it's not real," she says. "Often I also get very protective of the guys I'm with, especially if you feel there's an insecurity there… they've really been working out or you know they've only agreed to show a left bum cheek or something."
Perhaps that is why Atwell insists Ray Winstone is the "sexiest" leading man she's ever starred alongside despite his wearing baggy, yellow underpants and offering more than a hint of a paunch. The brunette beauty shares the screen with Ray in her latest movie The Sweeney, Nick Love's big-screen remake of the cult 1970s TV series, and says: "One thing I love about Ray is he's so charismatic and full of charm. I play a flying officer who is having an affair with his character. Out of all my leading men he's definitely the sexiest. He's got these animalistic, primal, and alpha male qualities about him. You can tell he's got such a strong family bond, they mean everything to him and that is very attractive. Someone who can take care of his own. He's like a lion, so I really enjoyed being around him. He's one of the good guys."
The makers of the movie clearly think he has the Sex-Factor too: why else would they pair him with an extremely captivating woman young enough to be his daughter? "If people think I’m a sex symbol, then fine," says Winstone, who is reprising the role first played by John Thaw in ITV’s original version almost 40 years ago. "In fact it’s more than that — it’s fantastic! I’m a fat 55-year-old, so how do you expect me to feel at being cast as a bloke who has a girlfriend 25 years his junior? Importantly, though, I think it is plausible. It illustrates — quite rightly, in my opinion — that women don’t just go for young slim guys with six-packs. I’m old fashioned enough to believe that what women find attractive is being treated well, and Jack Regan does treat the woman in his life well and looks after her. You have to be a bit of a rogue, as well, I think, but you have to be a gentleman and a protector. That’s maybe what turns women on, although, of course, you’d need to ask a woman for some kind of confirmation of that."
At which point co-star Atwell piped in: "Charisma, presence, good manners, and a great sense of humour goes a long way, certainly more than six pack abs. I find men that can carry themselves with confidence are far more attractive. It’s not based on trying to impress anyone or insecurity, or trying to be something you’re not." Winstone admits he had a few qualms about playing a man enjoying a passionate affair with a woman a quarter of a century his junior. "Originally I thought it might be better if Regan had a girlfriend who was in her 40s," he says. "I’ve got daughters of 30 and 26 and there was slight discomfort at the thought of kissing someone of their age. But Hayley was fine about it — she saw no problem with the idea of our characters having a relationship, so we went with it." The pair do more than kiss, of course.
Although she says she finds those particular scenes too embarrassing to watch, Atwell thinks Winstone's "gentlemanly" nature made things "a lot less awkward". "Filming the sex scenes was in reality fun and silly," she adds. "It looks a lot more brutal than it was and being thrown up against a public toilet adds a little bit more danger to it," before admitting she had warned her parents the film might not be for them. More than anything Atwell generally finds filming such scenes to be "funny"; admitting it can also be "weird" being naked in front of a male production team who seem to be "enjoying it". She added: "Sex scenes are so funny to shoot, you are naked in them and both wearing nappies or covers. It's often a bit cold on set and you're in a warehouse or a studio and you're surrounded by guys who feel very uncomfortable and they are all trying to be respectful but they seem to be enjoying it at the same time. So there is a lot of weird stuff going on."
Returning finally to her chosen theme, Atwell reiterates: "I’ve always been a big believer in what you don’t see being much sexier than what you do see," she says. "Do you know what? I don’t think I’m curvaceous. It’s simply that most other actresses are really, stupidly tiny. When I meet some of them, I can’t believe it. I know I’ve got curves and big boobs and I’m never, ever going to complain about that. Plus I love how expressive my body is. The other day, I was looking back over footage of Any Human Heart, which was made before I started training for Captain America, and I looked at myself as Freya and thought, 'I like her and I believe in her. And I really believe that she loves Logan.' And there’s nothing sexier than that, is there?"
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