Hayley Atwell Central - Website with all about Hayley Atwell

admin | Sep 02, 2019

Hayley Atwell on ‘Blinded by the Light’ and Shooting Her ‘Avengers’ Ending

In 2017, the star received a call from Marvel and within a few weeks was on set playing Peggy Carter for a franchise-ending shot: “to just have two people slow-dancing was very beautiful.”

It was the end of an 11-year saga. The final moment of Avengers: Endgame shows Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) and Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) finally having that dance after Captain America travels back in time and decides to live out his life with his first love. The scene is also among the most dissected moments of Endgame, with fans (and even the filmmakers) split on what it all means.

For Atwell, it was just one afternoon shot in secret in 2017. She received a call a few weeks earlier and was informed that the moment might end the decade-plus story Marvel Studios had been building towards since 2008. After playing Peggy Carter through five movies and two seasons of television on ABC’s Agent Carter, Endgame could be Atwell’s final turn as Peggy in live action.

“I thought it was a fitting end to a story that has affected so many people. I thought it was very endearing, innocent and wholesome in the way that it keeps those characters in their time,” Atwell tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Atwell is back in theaters this weekend with Blinded by the Light, a film from Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha, which tells the true story of a British-Pakistani kid who becomes enamored with the music of Bruce Springsteen. Atwell plays Ms. Clay, an encouraging teacher to Javed (Viveik Kalra).

In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Atwell discusses her inspirations for Blinded by the Light and weighs in on Marvel’s animated What If? series, which will see her reprise her role as Peggy Carter. Continue reading »

TAGS: Interviews

admin | May 14, 2019

Hayley Atwell interview: ‘Movie stardom has lost its sheen’

In the Marvel films, British bombshell Peggy Carter needs no super powers to vanquish her enemies. But Hayley Atwell, the 37-year-old English actress who plays her in the most lucrative franchise ever made, certainly seems to possess something special.

When we meet, Atwell has just endured two and a half hours of emotional torment as the tragic heroine in a new West End production of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. Yet here she is signing autographs for fans at the stage door, wide-eyed and fresh as a sea breeze, looking as if she’s all set for a day’s work. Surely that’s a super power?

“I’ve never felt so energetic,” she tells me as she leads me to her dressing room in the Duke of York’s Theatre. “I think it has a lot to do with having experienced adversity. You know, moments of failure in my career. But then, once you’ve been around the block you can let go of the person you think you’re supposed to be. My friends in their thirties and forties are much happier now because of that. I mean, there was a reckless thrill when you were younger of working s— out and making horrendous mistakes, but now I feel I am driving my own life.”

If Atwell’s CV contains such mistakes, they are overwhelmed by her successes: an enviable combination of high-end television adaptations, a prolific stage career and, of course, the Avengers films and her own Netflix spin-off, Agent Carter.

To her performances, Atwell brings both a crisp-vowelled Blitz spirit and a forceful modernity, a contrast that has served her well in some of her biggest period drama roles – as the progressive Margaret Schlegel in the 2017 BBC adaptation of Howards End, and as Julia Flyte in the big-screen version of Brideshead Revisited (2008). Continue reading »

TAGS: Interviews

admin | Dec 14, 2018

Hayley Atwell admits she “felt disgusting” playing her character in The Long Song

“I’m doing things that go against my instincts as a person”

Hayley Atwell admitted that she felt “disgusting” playing such an execrable character in BBC One’s adaptation of Andrea Levy’s novel The Long Song, but that made it all the more important to inject “humanity” into the role.

The 36-year-old Agent Carter star plays Caroline Mortimer – a mistress who wields her power and status over a slave she plucks from her mother as a young child called July [played by Tamara Lawrance] during the final days of slavery in 19th century Jamaica.

Atwell says it would have been “reductive to play Caroline as a monster” and instead wanted to explore why Caroline did what she did, and what damage her systematic cruelty upon others ultimately did to her own soul.

“Caroline is so against my own value system and my own understanding but that was all the more reason that I wanted to put humanity in her,” the actress told Harper’s Bazaar UK at a screening for the series.

“Because it would be reductive to play her as a monster. That doesn’t give us anything, it doesn’t help us with the complex, intelligent question or conversation around it. I felt disgusting, and I felt gross but then I thought that’s how I’m meant to feel. I’m doing things going that against my instincts as a person.”

Atwell continued that Caroline didn’t really have much power or authority – despite being a sister of a plantation owner – and that her bullying behaviour is down to her own “insecurity and cowardice”

“Caroline has nothing that gives her any independent identity…. She gets a sense that the slaves are smarter than she is, and they know something about her that she doesn’t know about herself and therein lies how pathetic and almost endearing and awful she is,” she explained.

“It’s very textbook, I think, that bullying that comes from insecurity and cowardice, and where she tries to assert this authority that she doesn’t really have. I wanted to explore the psychological damage or the damage done to one’s psyche, when that person inflicts damage on someone else you think, ‘I bet she can’t live in her one skin’. She’s crawling in self-loathing.” Continue reading »

admin | Nov 08, 2018

Exclusive interview with Hayley Atwell: ‘I’m proud of my self-doubt, it keeps me vulnerable and questioning’

Stage and screen star Hayley Atwell is currently playing two lead roles a night in Measure for Measure at the Donmar Warehouse. She tells Nick Clark about how the production responded to contemporary gender politics, reveals the Shakespeare villain she’s longing to play and explains why pranking her co-stars keeps her performances fresh

Sitting in the offices of the Donmar Warehouse, where she is starring in Measure for Measure, Hayley Atwell starts talking, tentatively at first, about her plans. She pauses and rocks back in her chair. “Okay”, she smiles. “I guess we can put this out in the world…”

A look at Atwell’s career shows a restlessness and desire not to make the obvious choices. And, after working on a TV drama last year where everything changed for her, she has been thinking long and hard about doing something a bit different. “It occurs to me that I’ve been thinking about creating my own work, or directing something or producing something,” she says. “I would like to start my own production company.”

The idea is not yet fully formed – she jokes about the name: “Pig About Town. No, Kid About Town. Something lighthearted” – but she is serious about looking for projects, whether on film, television or in theatre, and not just to act in. She also reveals she has been writing. What has emerged over the course of our conversation is someone who thinks about the roles she chooses and the issues surrounding them. This is no different.

“I want original material, or to adapt books, with strong nuanced narratives of all different types of genre, collaborating with like-minded people. I think I have the experience and the skillset to know my own mind and trust what I can do, but I also want to collaborate with people.” She stops and laughs: “It feels as though I’m auditioning for you.” Continue reading »

TAGS: Interviews

admin | Apr 04, 2018

Hayley Atwell Takes on Starz’s ‘Howards End’ Remake in Time’s Up Era

The British actress said the 117-year-old novel is relevant today, and got advice from Emma Thompson, who won an Oscar for the same role.

It might have been intimidating for British actress Hayley Atwell to sign on for the lead in Starz’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s literary classic “Howards End,” given the long shadow cast by Emma Thompson, who won a Best Actress Oscar for the 1992 Merchant-Ivory film version. But Atwell had some help from Thompson herself.

“Emma’s a friend of mine, and I’m very familiar with her performance in it,” Atwell says. “I e-mailed her to say, ‘They’re doing the impossible, they’re going to attempt to make this,’ and being Emma, incredibly generous and warm, she said ‘You’re about to work with a writer, E.M. Forster, who is one of literature’s first proper feminists. [The character] Margaret will change you — she’s an extraordinary person. You are she and she is you.’ She passed the baton in a way.”

Of the new miniseries, which debuts in the U.S. April 8, Atwell says, “The look of it is different, the energy is different.” For one thing, the novel was adapted for the small screen by Kenneth Lonergan (“Manchester By the Sea”) and directed by British filmmaker Hettie MacDonald.

“It’s adapting in four hours as opposed to a 90-minute film, so there’s more of the book in it, and Kenny’s writing takes so much of the content of the text and the dialogue and lifts it, but puts it into a very fresh way that’s accessible and real, so that it feels relevant to today,” she adds.

The 117-year-old novel continues to enjoy a reputation as one of the greats the 20th century, and Atwell says she sees both the timeless qualities of the story and its appeal to contemporary audiences. Continue reading »

TAGS: Howards End • Interviews

admin | Apr 04, 2018

Hayley Atwell Introduces the World of Howards End

Alongside a set of exclusive portraits, the actress opens up about her role in the new miniseries based on the E. M. Forster classic.

Merchant Ivory immortalized E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End in a glorious, Oscar-winning film in 1992, and now, a new BBC/Starz miniseries is rebooting the timeless drama for a contemporary audience. The four-part adaptation follows three vastly different families—the intellectual Schlegel sisters, the capitalist Wilcoxes and the impoverished Basts—as they intertwine and clash at the dawn of the modern era.

The series, directed by Hettie MacDonald and written by Oscar-winning Manchester by the Sea writer Kenneth Lonergan, centers on fiercely independent Margaret Schlegel (Hayley Atwell) and her idealistic sister Helen (Philippa Coulthard). As Margaret finds herself drawn into the inner circle of the wealthy, mysterious Wilcoxes, Helen devotes herself to a young working-class man desperate to improve himself, setting up the three families for a calamitous encounter when long-buried secrets and private prejudices come to light.

Alongside these gorgeous portraits, exclusive to BAZAAR.com, Atwell walks us through this fascinating cast of characters and why the women and relationships of Howards End should be the new normal in film and television.

Howards End premieres Sunday, April 8 on Starz.

1 Hayley Atwell as Margaret Schlegel

“Emma Thompson [who played Margaret in the 1992 film] told me she believes E. M. Forster is one of literature’s first proper feminists, in the sense that he gave [Margaret] her full mind,” says Atwell. “He gave her so many dimensions. She can be contradictory, and hypocritical, and self-aware but also completely naïve. She is passionate yet maternal. She is rational yet, at times, incredibly confused and overwhelmed. All of this is done with such elegance and emotional intelligence and clarity, which is like, ‘Wow, this is written by a guy?'” Continue reading »

TAGS: Howards End • Interviews

admin | Feb 22, 2018

Hayley Atwell: ‘I want more parts that debunk female stereotypes’

Avengers star Hayley Atwell says playing a woman “who doesn’t rely on her beauty or her charm” was part of the appeal of her new play set in the world of private equity.

The actress plays Jenny in Dry Powder, a cold calculating businesswoman with no sense of the human cost of her decisions, in her first stage role in five years.

She said: “This was the first play I had read that had debunked female stereotypes and for me I hadn’t seen a female character like this before.

“There is no sexual chemistry, that’s new, she doesn’t rely on her beauty or her charm, she has none, she is someone who thinks in numbers and severely lacks emotional intelligence.

“Everything is very much compartmentalised, she sees things as an equation to be worked out.”

Atwell, who admits she was ignorant of the world of finance before taking on the role, spent time with the play’s writer, New Yorker Sarah Burgess, and with people who work in the industry as part of her research.

She said: “I had no interest in it so when I read the script for maybe the first quarter of it I was thinking I don’t really understand a lot of this but I know it’s really good writing, I know it’s very witty, I think the characters are very distinct and I’m understanding that there are different arguments going on.

“By the end of it it didn’t matter that I didn’t really understand the financial jargon.” Continue reading »

TAGS: Interviews • News

admin | Feb 22, 2018

Hayley Atwell: ‘It’s very liberating to play someone who’s unapologetically ruthless’

The actor on her return to the stage as a Wall Street villain, her debt to Emma Thompson and why she wouldn’t work with Woody Allen again

London-born Hayley Atwell, 35, graduated from Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2005 and within months landed her debut film role in Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream. She has twice been Olivier award-nominated for stage roles, and after playing Peggy Carter in the Captain America films, landed her own TV spin-off, Marvel’s Agent Carter. She starred in autumn’s acclaimed BBC adaptation of Howards End and is currently making her debut at Hampstead theatre in Dry Powder.

You’re starring in Sarah Burgess’s Wall Street comedy Dry Powder. How’s it going?
It’s a real delight. I hadn’t been on stage for five years and was looking for something that jumped off the page, a female role with wit and chutzpah. The play’s set in the world of high finance and initially I didn’t understand the lingo or the rampant capitalism. But it grew on me. Turns out it’s very liberating to play someone who’s unapologetically ruthless.

Yes, your character Jenny is quite villainous…
She’s described as “a vampire” with “sociopathic tendencies”, yet Jenny’s happy with herself and sleeps well at night. She doesn’t have that moment where she breaks down and says “My daddy abused me” and the audience go “Aha, that’s why she’s such a bitch”. Sure, she lacks emotional intelligence and lives in a world of numbers, but if a man in her position displayed those qualities, he’d probably get a pat on the back. Continue reading »

TAGS: Interviews

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