By Sarah Thomas
Vanessa Kirby at the UK premiere of the latest instalment in the Mission: Impossible franchise.Credit: Getty Images
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It’s a sunny Friday afternoon in the East London suburb of Hackney, with market-stall hustle and bustle, chitter-chatter and traffic jostling for space, as Britain eases into its first glimpses of summer.
In the midst of this, Vanessa Kirby is walking down the street, on the phone to Spectrum as part of her promotional duties for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh installment in the multibillion-dollar blockbuster empire.
We’ve got straight into the heavy stuff – talking about her spectacular stock-in-trade of rule-breakers and unconventional women, and the childhood bullying that led her there – before she stops her train of thought as she’s beginning to get drowned out.
Tom Cruise and Vanessa Kirby attend the UK Premiere of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.Credit: Getty Images
“Sorry, I’m just getting off this very busy road,” she says, laughing. “I was on my way back from something. And it’s a really beautiful day, so I just thought I would walk. I thought it might be nicer.”
And why not? It’s funny to think of a star of her calibre, spruiking Tom Cruise’s M:I juggernaut – with a cumulative global box-office bounty of $US3.6 billion ($5.3bn) to date, by the way – wandering down the street. But it’s delightfully apt for Kirby, who has carved out a fascinating career playing people being or doing things out of the ordinary.
Tom Cruise and Vanessa Kirby in the latest film.
“I suppose that’s true,” she says, of her choice of roles. “I mean, even all the theatre roles I did. If it was Masha in Three Sisters, or Yelena in Uncle Vanya –they’re all women who try to tear up the rulebook.
“I’ve always been interested in outsiders or underdogs, or challenging the status quo. Maybe I find it inspiring in my own life, or maybe I like to play women who shake things up,” she says.
Case in point: her character in Mission, who debuted in the last film, Fallout, in 2018. Kirby is the mysterious activist and philanthropist Alanna Mitsopolis, aka the White Widow, whose real gig is arms trading and money-laundering, with a strong side hustle in stolen plutonium. Kirby plays her as commanding and arch, but also with a keenness to avoid the conventional femme fatale, using sex as currency.
Hugh Jackman and Vanessa Kirby in a scene from The Son.Credit: Rob Youngson/Sony Pictures Classics
“I wanted her to be unusual and unpredictable and have slightly strange energy,” she says. “And it was just really fun to be able to play with that rather than have it be about trading any kind of sexuality to get what you want.”
Given films of this magnitude, it’s both strange and perhaps lucky for her that she’s still able to travel under the radar around London. She still has a bit of the “what’s she been in?” vibe about her – which seems at odds with her success so far.
Now 35, she comes from a stellar theatre pedigree, with an array of celebrated performances at the National Theatre and Young Vic in the 2010s. Her step up to the screen saw her as the hedonistic, young Princess Margaret in the first two seasons of The Crown (2016-17), for which she won the best actress BAFTA. In 2020, she played a grieving mother in Netflix’s Pieces of a Woman, scoring Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe and SAG nominations, and the best actress prize at Venice. She’s also taken a spin with another big franchise, the Fast & Furious fam in Hobbs & Shaw (2019), and later this year she’s up in Ridley Scott’s historical drama Napoleon as Empress Josephine, who bewitched the French leader, played by Joaquin Phoenix.
Vanessa Kirby in season two of The Crown.
Even so, it becomes clear that even she doesn’t note herself as a famous person. We talk about the megastardom of Cruise and she says she sees his magnitude of fame as similar to that of the royal family. She adds, as an aside, that when the Queen died she was in the US, and Americans, in coffee shops or wherever, on hearing her accent would come up and offer their condolences. She tells this story but doesn’t seem to register the whopping irony of not, in such circumstances, being spotted for playing one of the royals in the high-profile way that she did.
Her portrayal of Margaret in the first two seasons was one of the major early drawcards of The Crown and a shining example of how her characters are never one note – they’re a polyphony. Kirby’s decadent Margaret is an absolute force: stroppy, sullen, never far from a drink, cigarette or eyeroll. Then, with a flicker of those same steely eyes, we’re inside her fragility, her fear, her lonely confines of duty.
Perhaps the only interest Kirby may have in celebrity – despite being an engaged and forthcoming interviewee – is the platform for interesting roles, and, now, creating them too. More of that later. But first, back to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, an instalment so epic it’s split into two, with the second part, the eighth and supposedly final M:I, out next year.
“Um, yes, we’re not really allowed to say much, are we?” she says about the film, as is often the way with these things.
Molly Parker, left, and Vanessa Kirby in Pieces of a Woman.Credit: Netflix
But what we do know is production began in early 2020, and was beset by COVID delays as it shifted around Europe. Despite that, it has materialised as the longest M:I yet –a bladder-busting two hours and 36 minutes. Cruise continues to out-Cruise himself in stunts, this time riding a motorbike off a cliff and then parachuting to the ground – a feat he didn’t perform just once but a full six times to get the shot right.
Kirby says Cruise is inspirational in his ambition. “He always wants to better what he’s done, whether it’s on that day doing a stunt or the scene he wants it to be – to strive to do your best work, whatever the conditions. He’s just such a cinephile, he knows cinema from the inside and outside in every single way, and you get a vast education from working with him.
“He very much encouraged me to be my biggest self and just dream of the things that I most wanted to do.”
It was after Fallout, that she took on her first lead screen role in Pieces of a Woman by Hungarian filmmakers Kornel Mundruczo and Kata Weber, a real-life couple who based the story about the death of a newborn on their own experience of a miscarriage. It is an extraordinary performance by Kirby, as Martha, a bewildered, dead-eyed, exhausted, grieving mother. And that’s not all – the film begins with an astonishing 25-minute scene of her giving birth – burps, grunts, primal wails and all.
“I waited a really long time to do it,” she says. “And that experience where I got to do a birth on screen for a quarter of the screen time, unedited, unsanitised … It was a miracle it was financed [at all] – and for it to be seen by so many people on Netflix was such an honour.”
But, in typical Kirby fashion, that’s not enough – there’s always more at play.
Tom Cruise, left, and Vanessa Kirby in a scene from Mission: Impossible – Fallout.Credit: AP
She grew up in a seemingly idyllic middle-class setting in Wimbledon, London to parents Jane, the former editor of posh lifestyle magazine Country Living, and Roger, a leading prostate surgeon. But she was badly bullied in primary school, something that became her own catapult out of the ordinary and into drama in school clubs, where she found her tribe.
She says she experienced “systemic” bullying – “I just had a really hard time. I was very ostracised and felt incredibly on my own” – but has rather a sense of gratitude about it now.
“I think the main thing is it builds empathy. I look back now and I think I’m not sure I would’ve been an actor had I not had that three or four-year experience,” she says.
“I think it meant that I’ve always had a very strong drive to understand the ‘other’ experience. I’m always looking at the margins. I’m interested in that, always, much more than conformity.
“I developed a much stronger sense of self and became more empathetic for anybody going through something difficult. I like to lean into the difficult spaces with characters or journeys.”
The cast of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One at the UK premiere.Credit: Getty Images
She’s now at the point of creating new journeys with her production company, Aluna Entertainment, launched in 2021 with her sister Juliet and producer Lauren Dark, which has a first-look deal with Netflix.
They’ve been working hard on a slate of 14 “very different” projects, she says, and she feels a deep responsibility in this purpose.
In her theatre career, she explains, the roles she cut her teeth on, written by Shakespeare, Chekhov and Arthur Miller, were “far more challenging” compared with the ones she’d go up for later on screen, “the girlfriend or, you know, the second best friend or something”.
She says it’s because screen productions are mostly made by male, writers, directors and financiers and “understandably from their perspective, they have written their experience and produced their experience”.
Whereas Pieces of a Woman demonstrated that something challenging written by a woman based on personal experience could be made and would connect with an audience through a platform like Netflix.
“Now we’re just beginning,” she says. “We’re at the very beginning of changing the landscape of cinema, potentially with putting more and more female journeys [on screen] – messy, human, female characters, not the kind of movie, bubble-gum women that I’ve read [in] a lot of scripts.
“I feel like it’s part of my mission and it’s my responsibility now to start creating those stories. They’re not just roles for me, it’s choosing stories and creators, whether they’re male or female, who want to tell those stories, to put things on screen we haven’t seen before.
“That’s my big mission. And, it’s been so fulfilling and exciting and I’m so deeply grateful for the opportunity, and I really want to do it to be able to change things in however small a way.“
Mission, as they say, accepted.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is in cinemas from July 13.
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