How Haley Bennett ripped up the Hollywood rule book
Whether she’s playing a femme fatale, a trophy wife or a villain, Haley Bennett gives a riveting performance in every film. There is a chameleon quality that means you don’t always recognise her immediately. She was the woman stalked by Emily Blunt in The Girl on the Train (2016), and wowed critics in the feminist thriller Swallow (2019), about a woman with a disorder involving the eating of objects that are not food.
There is an air of Southern belle to Bennett. But growing up in the backwoods of Ohio, she was a tomboy who learnt to shoot and kept pigs and ferrets. When Antoine Fuqua cast her as the lone woman in The Magnificent Seven, she brought an apple pie to the audition.
Indeed, Bennett has always done things on her own terms. At the 2021 London premiere of Cyrano (in which she starred opposite Peter Dinklage), she made headlines in a cage crinoline dress that she and designer Elena Dawson had custom-made. She is very open about not fitting sample sizes. “I look at these clothes and think, ‘That will fit my daughter but there is no way I’m getting my thighs into that!’ I don’t want to be discouraged when I go to fittings. so I like working with women, like Elena, who take risks.”
Now Bennett is to appear in Widow Clicquot, a biopic of the champagne pioneer Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin, who was 27 when she took over her late husband’s vineyard but went on to become the grande dame of champagne, creating the first vintage in 1810.
Bennett says it was a challenge to make a period film set over 20 years on location in France. “You need resilience and vision, much like the Widow herself,” she says. “For [her], that meant overcoming nature, her own doubts about her abilities and talent.
“I love that journey of finding strength, rather than starting out with this stereotypical idea of an independent woman.”
The 36-year-old adds: “I’m not interested in playing a damsel in distress anymore. I think that very much has to do with not being able to relate to those characters now. Ten years ago, I could easily have done that. But now I’m making projects that align with where I am in my life.”
I am talking to Bennett at the National Trust property Stourhead near her home in Bruton, Somerset, where she lives with her partner, the British film director Joe Wright (whose Pride and Prejudice was filmed at the stately home), and their five-year-old daughter Virginia. She keeps chickens, is signed up to the town’s WhatsApp group and is on first-name terms with Pat the Taxi Man (fellow clients include Benedict Cumberbatch and George Osborne).
Living in the English countryside has been “nurturing” after a nomadic childhood. She grew up in the Midwest, but after her parents split when she was six, she mostly lived with her car-mechanic father, who often moved for work.
“It’s idyllic here,” she laughs, “though not at my house right now.” They have five teens staying (including Wright’s two sons from his marriage to musician Anoushka Shankar) plus Virginia and Wright’s mother and sister, who are curating an exhibition of puppetry at Hauser & Wirth’s Make gallery.
There was a whiff of scandal after Wright and Bennett fell in love while working on a film that later lost its finances, and Shankar filed for divorce. Still, bridges appear to have been built. The boys stay with them every two weeks and during the holidays.
“It’s been a learning process. But Virginia was a great peacemaker. She’s been such a light in all our lives. And I’m very grateful for those boys. They’re such good big brothers.”
Bennett describes herself as shy but driven. She loved school plays and singing in the church choir. At 18, she drove to Hollywood with her mother. She gave herself three months to “make it”. At the last minute, she snagged an agent and the role of a teen popstar in the 2007 Hugh Grant comedy Music and Lyrics.
Conversation turns to US politics. Bennett played J D Vance’s sister Lindsay in the Netflix adaptation of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy (2020), written before he became Trump’s running mate, which details the social isolation, poverty and addiction that afflict certain white communities.
Vance grew up in Ohio, too, and Bennett believes director Ron Howard brought her in because she understands the American working-class experience. “They could literally be my family. Whatever political differences I have with any characters I play, I try to understand their humanity, but I really recognised those characters.”
At this point in the interview, Bennett opens her phone and quotes a mesmerising passage from Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem about not turning your back on where you came from, otherwise the “people we used to be” might arrive at 4am on a bad night and demand to know who deserted them and seek revenge. Although her life is very different now, Bennett is clearly not someone who will forget her roots.
She is careful not to say how she’ll vote in the US election, but her reaction is telling: “I think we need to champion women. Honestly, we’re going backwards. We have to keep moving. Otherwise a lot of decisions will be made by men on our behalf, 100 per cent.” Bennett is also determined to collaborate with more women directors. “I’m really getting into this rhythm, and it’s not masculine, it’s very much feminine, but strong and exciting.”
But what about working with her partner (he directed her in Cyrano)? “Joe laughs and says he thinks he’s a lesbian in a man’s body.”
‘Widow Clicquot’ opens in cinemas on Friday August 23
