Who is Haley Bennett? The actress everyone is talking about meets Ajesh Patalay to talk The Girl on the Train and imminent superstardom.
Like any sensible person, Haley Bennett has been gearing up for this moment – the moment her star goes stratospheric and her life changes forever – by running as far away from it as possible. Specifically, Europe, on vacation with her boyfriend, entrepreneur Andrew Frame. And from the sound of things, they sought oblivion in large amounts of food.
“We were in Italy for nine days. It was all Italian food and we’re big foodies,” Bennett, 28, enthuses. “We got to Amsterdam for a wedding and Italian food was being served, so we were like, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ We abandoned the wedding and found an Indian restaurant instead. It was fantastic.”
Two days back in New York, it seems she is still under the spell of the Mediterranean; languid and far away. I assume – from the coffee cup and beer already on the table when I arrive at the East Village Thai restaurant she’s chosen for lunch – that she’s jet-lagged. But, as it turns out, she isn’t. “I didn’t really feel jet-lag coming back,” she reports. The dreaminess is just her.
Outwardly, Bennett comes across as an all-American homebody in her white vest, white cable-knit cardigan, Levi’s 501s and “the most comfortable moccasins ever” by Minnetonka. But her accessories tell a different, more intriguing story: a new Dior watch (a gift from the French fashion house, whose recent Cruise show she attended); a Korean bonnet (“Immediately upon looking at a piece of clothing, I create a whole story of where I could take it – ‘Oh, I’ll be running through a poppy field wearing that”); and a Red Riding Hood-style basket instead of a handbag: “I had this made after seeing a photograph of Jane Birkin carrying a basket in the ’60s. I thought it was really sweet.”
Then there’s the relish with which she orders a slew of dishes (all “Thai spicy”) for us to share, heaping food onto my plate, and shoveling rice and meat into her mouth with her hand. “I didn’t eat this morning so that I’d have a healthy appetite,” she declares. It’s impossible not to be won over.
“She’s interesting in this weird, quirky, beautiful way,” says The Girl on the Train director Tate Taylor, who cast Bennett as ‘perfect wife’ Megan after she turned up to his Baton Rouge house with a lemon meringue pie she had baked herself (“It felt like a very Southern thing to do,” Bennett explains). A number of industry people had already recommended her, unsolicited, for the role. “Even when I was meeting with [co-star] Emily Blunt in London,” Taylor recalls, “she was like, ‘You know who would be interesting? I’ve never seen her act but I sat next to her at an event and she’s really different, in a good way.’”
That was partly the reason Taylor wanted Bennett for Megan, a character who could, in a different actor’s hands, seem no more than a promiscuous bombshell. But, says Taylor, “Haley brought a seductress, a little girl, a vulnerable person, a strong, angry woman. She really filled her out.”
The key for Bennett was in making the audience feel protective towards Megan – something she admits people frequently feel for her in real life (“I don’t know why, but I get that often”). “There’s this open-book quality to [Bennett],” says Taylor, perhaps touching on the reason. “She reminds me of Jane Fonda. I worked with Jane; I met her, we had lunch and I knew everything about her. Stuff where I was like, ‘Wow, you are really sharing right now.’ Haley is the same way.”
You can see that in Bennett’s Instagram feed (@halolorraine); an unfiltered window on her world, filled with snaps of her family, her boyfriend and her eccentrically named cats: Margaret Edith, Darlington Abigail and Ernest Cotton. “I’m trying to preserve the essence of really who I am, instead of who people want me to be,” the actress insists.
Growing up in Ohio, the daughter of divorced parents, she says she was a “very introverted” child. But she loved singing: “I sang in school and the church choir. And I entered talent contents.” In high school, she became a “drama geek” and, despite only playing minor roles in school productions, she dreamed of becoming a movie star. “It was the closest thing to magic I could imagine,” she says. “I wanted to be over the rainbow, to be somebody other than myself, somebody that didn’t live in Ohio.”
So, at 18, she went to Los Angeles for three months, just to see. “It was a crazy plan. There was no plan at all,” Bennett admits. But she enrolled in an acting course, met some agents and suddenly found herself flying to New York to screen test for Music and Lyrics, starring Drew Barrymore.
How she won the role is a classic star-is-born story. First, on the flight out, she and her mother were so excited that they “were taking photos of our first class meals with a disposable camera”. Then, the night before the test, Bennett found out she needed to perform a dance routine, and in a panic looked for a professional dancer in the phone book to choreograph one. Finally, at the test, “I was gyrating on the floor, [then I] said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do this,’ and sort of cried. Back at the hotel with my mom, I was like, ‘I don’t think I’m cut out for this.’ Three hours later, I got the call. Maybe Drew saw a human quality in me that she hadn’t seen in others.”
But after the film’s release in 2007... Nothing. “I couldn’t get auditions. I couldn’t even pay for my gas,” she recalls. “Because of those experiences, I wake up every day with gratitude. Everyone pays their dues – those are mine.”
It took Terrence Malick casting her opposite Christian Bale in Weightless in 2010 to change things. “It was a turning point, not just with my confidence, but in how people perceived me. I think [Malick] sort of anoints you. I told Terrence, ‘If this doesn’t work out, I’m going to quit acting and work in a library.’ Then on the last day he told me, ‘Never quit – this is what you’re meant to do.’”
Typically for Malick’s films, Weightless has only just been slated for release next year, when Bennett will already have wowed audiences in the Warren Beatty-directed Rules Don’t Apply (“[Beatty and I] have a great friendship. I think he’s strange, he thinks I’m strange; we’re on a level playing field”), and as a horse-riding, field-ploughing gunslinger in The Magnificent Seven, opposite Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and Ethan Hawke. “I was pretty good at shooting,” she boasts. “I don’t know if that comes from my dad being a hunter and it’s just in my blood. I would shoot 20 bullets through the bull’s eye on the targets, and send them off to show all the guys what I was made of, like, ‘You better be on your game, because I’m coming for you!’”
As for The Girl on the Train, she confesses the graphic scenes of sex and violence pushed her to the limit. “I mean, I won’t be doing The Girl on the Train 2,” she laughs. Tate Taylor raves about her performance: “This movie is all Haley. She did some of the toughest work any actress could be asked to do.” So when it comes to facing down whatever rollercoaster is coming next, he’s in no doubt: “She’s ready, man.”
Bennett, true to form, talks about the future in more winsome terms. “I feel like I’m entering the party,” she says. “It’s a time of celebration, and that’s exciting.”
The Girl on the Train is out Oct 5 (Uk); Oct 7 (Us)
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