Peaky Blinders’ Annabelle Wallis on her Hollywood breakthrough

As is often the way with blind dates, Annabelle Wallis isn’t quite what I was expecting. I know her as Grace from Peaky Blinders, the television gangster series set in interwar Birmingham. Grace is softly spoken, Irish, an undercover agent; a complex and alluring mix of demure, understated, passionate and fearless. Wallis, on the other hand, has a tomboyish demeanour and is in frenetic, broadcast mode, as though operating on emergency energy reserves.

Today is her first day off in weeks from playing the female lead in Tom Cruise’s reboot of The Mummy. Through an exaggerated clenched smile, she says: “I feel like I’m alone on a planet that’s pretty interesting.” But the show must go on.

Wallis isn’t quite a household name yet, as is evidenced by the tabloids currently prefixing her with “Chris Martin from Coldplay’s girlfriend”(she contributed backing vocals to last year’s A Head Full of Dreams album). Sitting opposite me, though, sipping honeyed peppermint tea in her local café in Spitalfields, east London, she seems every inch the ballsy Hollywood pro. She is superhumanly beautiful and larger than life, owning all available space as she horses around and goes off on tangents. “I can just talk and talk,” she says, rolling with the absurdity of sitting in a cosy booth, selling herself to a stranger. “We’re on a date,” she jokes, “chat, chat, chat.”

Peaky Blinders, with its brilliant writing, cast (including Helen McCrory and Tom Hardy) and cinematic production values, became an international hit after Netflix snapped it up from the BBC. For two seasons now, beneath lashings of intrigue and raw violence, the smouldering tension between gang-leader Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) and Grace has provided a rich seam of heady romance. Shelby is always one step ahead of his scheming foes, except when it came to Grace, who was slumming it among the Peaky Blinders clan to gather evidence against him.

Series two saw Grace flee to America and a sensible marriage, only to reunite with Shelby on a visit to London, and become pregnant. The final episode ended with Shelby narrowly escaping execution, before announcing he was to marry. Both audience and cast were left on tenterhooks as to whether Grace would be his bride. All will be revealed when series three starts on Thursday.

“Honestly,” says Wallis, “playing Grace changed everything for me. I was believable in a strong, female, alpha role.” Unlike some of the show’s other characters, who were based on the relatives of series creator Steven Knight, Grace was pure invention, giving Wallis extra freedom to mould her. Moreover, when they started filming, Knight had only written two episodes. After which, she says, “he would write off the cuff . . . we didn’t know what Grace was going to become”.

Wallis had so much emotional investment in the role that, when she read the scripts for series two, “I got really upset when I discovered there was another woman. I emailed Steven and was like: ‘What? Excuse me?’” she says.

Before she met Murphy, Wallis heard he was worried they hadn’t cast an Irish actress as Grace. “I can stand my ground,” she says, but it was a relief when they hit it off. One of her favourite scenes, she recalls, took place on a dance floor. “We had this over-the-top dance teacher, who kept trying to make us do jazz hands,” she says. “Cillian was like [adopts his Irish accent]: ‘I’m a fecking gangster, I don’t do jazz hands.’ And I was like: ‘I’ll do jazz hands!’ Most of our dancing got cut because we were just being ridiculous.”

Wallis was born in Oxford but grew up “feral” and “sporty” on the family farm in Portugal. She attended an international school, speaks four languages and has an exotic international hybrid accent. Her father had acted in his youth and the late Richard Harris was her uncle. She felt drama was in her blood but could only go so far in Portugal, so she followed her nose to London.

While Wallis was considering drama schools, she found an agent. “I’m a blagger by trade,” she says. “I said, ‘If you take me on, I’ll get myself a job, I promise you.’” She promptly landed herself a part in the crime drama series Jericho, starring Robert Lindsay. It was frowned on to do acting work while in training, “and I thought that a ludicrous idea”, she says, so she ditched the school idea and never looked back.

It is since Peaky Blinders, however, that Wallis has become a Hollywood player. She appears in plenty of new film roles in the coming months. “I did this film with Aaron Paul [from Breaking Bad] called Come and Find Me,” she says of the first. She plays his girlfriend, who turns out to be a double agent and disappears, leading him into the Los Angeles underworld. “Yes me,” she says. “This goofy human being can be very serious. Also, I get to rescue him on a motorbike, and that’s been my highlight of the last five years.”

Then there is an Afghanistan-based psychological thriller, Mine, due to receive its premiere at the Venice Film Festival this August and September. And in early 2017, Guy Ritchie’s Knights of the Roundtable: King Arthur will be released. “I was adamant,” she says, “going into a big boys’ film, that whatever I played she was going to be an equal.”

Having grown up in a “house full of boys”, matching them at motocross, paintballing and horse-wrangling, she says she was spoiling for a decent fight sequence. “In every scene I was like: ‘OK, so now I punch him?’ And Guy was like: ‘Stop!’”

Playing Grace changed everything for me. I was believable in a strong, female, alpha role

She is thrilled with her role in The Mummy. “I play an archaeologist, and she is kick-ass,” says Wallis. “I was worried that I’d come out of Peaky and not get any work but . . . Oh, and I did the Sacha Baron Cohen film Grimsby,” she suddenly remembers. “It’s been a year of diverse roles, but the through line is that these are formidable females, and they’re the females in my life. Most women I know are not actresses, but they work for the UN or are documentary filmmakers, anthropologists.”

She sees this as a pivotal time for women in her industry, and is fully behind Hollywood’s equal-pay campaigners. Is the movement working? “Yeah, I asked for a little more than I’m usually allowed and I got it.”

She sounds impressively cocky, I say. “Oh yeah, I’m really cocky,” she nods. “Or, I’ve been thinking about this word a lot, I’m mischievous and I want to make light of things and push the boundaries.” Does this ever backfire? “I have way more bravery than common sense,” she admits, “but you always assume things are going to be so difficult and then when you’re actually faced with them, you prevail. It’s human nature.”

With that, she’s off to another meeting. “Remember to give me five stars on Tinder,” she says. “And I’ll give you five, too.”

‘Peaky Blinders’, BBC Two, 9pm, May 5

Photographs: Anna Huix; Robert Viglasky