Perfect English

Photo by Mike Rosenthal

The experience of doing the Showtime series was a very different one from that of a feature film. “The sheer amount of commitment and planning—you commit to a show long-term; it’s like joining a family,” the actress says. “I am always so in awe of all the different creative departments, wardrobe, the writing team, makeup, forever having to evolve to keep the audience engaged, constant research—and they give so much of their time out of sheer passion for what they do. That teaches you, as a young actor, a lot about loving your job. It was a wonderful process to be part of and contribute towards. [On] a movie you come in, do your work and you’re out. The same amount of work and dedication goes into it, but after a month or so you can relax, whereas a TV show has to keep up such a high standard for years.”

When her reign as Jane Seymour was finished, Wallis took a time out rather than plunge headlong into the next venture. “I felt very fortunate to have landed such a great gig,” she explains of her decision to take a break. “It was important to maintain that I was an actress and not get lured into a scene of actors who land a defining job and then spend the rest of their lives being photographed at parties and not building their résumé and perfecting their craft.” Instead, she spent her time reading a host of scripts and mulling over her choices so she felt confident she was making the ones that were best for her and for her career.

Those choices ended up being roles in W.E., a new film directed by Madonna that chronicles the scandalous love story of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII; the current box-office hit X-Men: First Class; the upcoming ABC television series Pan Am, which also co-stars Christina Ricci and centers around the lives of pilots and flight attendants back in the glory days of air travel; and Strike Back, a 10-hour action series and the first scripted drama to air on Cinemax—quite a garden variety of productions. “I have been so fortunate to be part of all these amazing, vastly different projects,” Wallis says. “As an actress, stereotyping is rampant in our industry. I love that I have just gone from Pan Am, which is set in the 60s, with all vintage clothing and a cool, sexy script, to Strike Back, where I play a real action heroine who works for the United Nations, with bombs going off and shooting guns. I am loving it! I am a true tomboy at heart, so it’s fun to dance back and forth between these strong, cerebral, wonderful women I’ve been given to play.”

Wallis has a wish list of directors she’d like to work with in the future, including Pedro Almodovar (“for the way he portrays women with such eloquent honesty”), Jean-Luc Godard (“I’m a true lover of French cinema,” she explains), and Walter Salles (“he’s Brazilian, and I’d love to do a Portuguese-speaking film with someone as good as he is”). Then there are the fellow thespians with whom she’d love to act—Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett and Joaquin Phoenix among them. But when asked what her long-term career goals are, rather than get specific, Wallis replies, “I hope to just be working, to be able to play challenging women. I feel a real duty to myself to show women as not solely an accessory to [men]. I will be on Pan Am for ABC starting in July. It is a dream project for me; I have the most incredible girl crush on my character, Bridget—she is just so cool. It would be nice to gain freedom of choice and to be at the point career-wise where, when I want to start a family, I can afford to
take the time out to give the rest of my life and my family just as much time.”

Meanwhile, Wallis still hasn’t gone Hollywood, and it doesn’t seem likely she ever will. She lives contentedly in London, in an old dairy with her boyfriend. “We have the most amazing dinner parties,” she says. “I am a great host and love long nights of talking, eating and dancing. Living in London is living right in the heart of such a culturally rich pool. It is so diverse and inspiring. You can feel free to be whatever you want without judgment; therefore, it feels like people are unafraid to really be who they are and live out all their eccentricities and create. Great music, art, fashion—I love it.”

In addition to entertaining, Wallis likes to spend her downtime exploring—in her words, “I love to walk aimlessly through cities in search of treasures and of stories to tell. I like stumbling across abandoned little churches, finding old book shops that inspired great writers, little coffee shops and antiques shops filled with madness and visual stimuli,” she says. “I love to cook and host dinners and feed those I love, catch up on life stories. I go home to Portugal and live in a bikini. I am an addicted traveler. I do my best to travel to off-the-map locations. I credit the traveling I was so fortunate to do as a child for opening my eyes to things I now have in my mental book for character inspiration. Every character I read, I feel like I have somewhere in my life experienced them, met them, sat in a random train somewhere with them…all because I went out in the world and experienced them through travel.” Her travels haven’t yet brought her to Miami, but one of her best friends has a house here, and Wallis will be visiting Florida this summer for the first time. With her trademark passion, she says, “I am very excited…I’m sure its filled with treasures.”