Hayley Atwell stars with Brenda Fricker and Vanessa Redgrave in Maeve Binchy's new film, and next up are Woody Allen and Brideshead Revisited. Expect to see her on magazine covers soon, writes Donald Clarke
I'm due to meet Hayley Atwell at 3.30pm at the Soho Hotel, in London, but the PR man isn't here yet. Never mind. Here's a comfy chair. I'll plonk myself down and kill time by watching John Cusack - for it is he - prowl ostentatiously about the foyer. Eventually, I come to suspect that the young, dark woman in the next chair might be Atwell. "Yes that's right," she says when I shuffle over and proffer a hand. "Shall we go into the lounge?"
She is not quite famous yet, but, unless an anvil falls on her head, her face will be turning up on magazine covers very soon. Atwell, who is 25, had decent roles in the recent television adaptations of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. She was very good in Fear of Fanny, the BBC's caustic examination of the grim decline of the chef Fanny Cradock. Real, grown-up renown will, however, come her way next year when she turns up in Woody Allen's new film and, playing the crucial role of Julia Flyte, in a new film version of Brideshead Revisited. Until then citizens will crowd around Cusack and leave her alone.
"It's amazing how celebrities make sure we know they're here," she says, laughing. "It's actually an exciting time for me at this stage. I am doing this good work, but people don't yet recognise me. I would find it difficult if that did happen, because I like watching. Right now my friends invite me to openings and so forth, and I can go and not get recognised. If that changed I think I'd just stop going to those places."
The next step in Atwell's ascent comes with the release this week of Anthony Byrne's How About You. Based on a story by Maeve Binchy, the film finds Atwell playing an irresponsible girl forced to temporarily take over the running of an old people's home after its manager, her sister, is called away on a family emergency. When you hear that the inmates are played by the likes of Joss Ackland, Vanessa Redgrave, Imelda Staunton, Brenda Fricker and Joan O'Hara you will understand they are all larger than life.
Atwell, who was raised in west London, appears to have had a ball shooting the film in Co Wicklow. "I was staying in this hotel and spent every free moment walking up the Sugar Loaf," she says. "I bought myself a tin whistle and taught myself The Wild Rover. It was great to get back to nature." So she wasn't in the pub with the gang every night? "Not really. Though Joss Ackland and I did start up a film club for the cast. He was absolutely appalled that I had seen so few films by Robert Mitchum."
She appears to have the poise and confidence required to get ahead in a cut-throat business. Her father, an American motivational speaker, whose marriage to her mother ended when Atwell was a child, might be delighted to see how assertively she holds herself. Given Dad's business and the fact that her mum was a bit of a bohemian, it is hardly surprising that she drifted into the theatre. "I see my father several times a year," she says. "One thing you would have to say about Mum and Dad is that they are not afraid to talk. That helped me get on stage and speak a little louder myself. They are both communicators."
After school, Atwell, no fool it seems, secured a place at Oxford, but she quickly realised that she had only applied to prove to herself she could get in. She duly headed off to the prestigious Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Since graduation, she has worked fairly consistently. Her supporting performance in an unintentionally hilarious television treatment of the romance between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles was, mercifully perhaps, banished to the cutting-room floor, but work at the Royal National Theatre and then in ITV's Mansfield Park followed.
Her break into movies came when she was cast alongside Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor in Woody Allen's upcoming Cassandra's Dream. "That was very funny," she says. "I read four or five lines for him, and we had some general chit-chat. I didn't really understand what it meant when he said I could take the script away with me. It was odd, because he's so secretive about those things. Then they called and said: 'I am glad you like it, because now we have somebody in mind for the part we are going to change the script.' " Atwell still didn't grasp that they were talking about her. "I thought: Yeah? Why are you telling me this? Who have you got? And they said, me. It was extraordinary how it happened."
Woody Allen films, fine as they so often are, turn up once a year. Adaptations of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited are considerably rarer. Julian Jarrold's upcoming film will, of course, have to escape from the considerable shadow of the classic ITV series, from 1981. Atwell has been cast as Lady Julia Flyte, the posh beauty who captivates Charles Ryder, a - hem, hem - close friend of her fey brother, Sebastian. Ben Wishaw plays Sebastian. Matthew Goode plays Charles. Castle Howard once again stands in for Castle Marchmain.
"Yes. Brideshead Revisited revisited," she quips. "I didn't see the series. I used the book as the bible and, of course, the script by Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies. It occurred to me that if I watched the series it might give me an easy way out if I was scared by the role. I could just do it as Diana Quick did it on television. But it helps that everyone brought such love and dedication to the adaptation of something so beloved."
The more she talks the more you marvel at her prodigious self-confidence, but she does admit to frequent moments of insecurity. "We had a number of dinners making How About You where we all talked about age," she says. "In your 20s you fear what's going to happen, but there is excitement about finding out things. In your 60s you maybe are a bit more thoughtful. Sometimes I long for my 30s and think I will be all right then. There will be fewer insecurities."
Oh, folk still have their insecurities in later decades. Look at John Cusack striding around waiting to get noticed. He's 41, for Pete's sake.
How About You is on limited release