I’m sitting in the corridor of London’s Rosewood Hotel when the door beside me opens. Out comes, not , the star of Jeff Nichols’s sun-soaked, sepia-toned new drama and the person I’m here to meet, but her dashing co-star , with whom the charming Liverpudlian is currently doing press. Dressed in leather, he ruffles his hair and gives me a backwards glance, growling, “Good luck.
” Wait, I think, do I need luck? Has the famously warm, laidback and relatable British TV staple gone all Hollywood since she graduated from the part of ’s Villanelle to the Emmy-, Olivier- and Tony Award-winning star of , , and ? When she’s ready for me and I enter the room, it’s immediately clear that she hasn’t: wearing an angelic floor-length white linen dress with shiny chrome silver platforms and a wonderfully beat-up oversized black leather jacket, the 31-year-old actor is every bit as relaxed, bubbly and playful as you’d expect – big in her gestures, quick to do funny voices, and forever getting to her feet to show you what she really means. So is the character she embodies in this latest release: the quippy, razor-sharp Kathy, the beleaguered narrator of the ’60s Chicago-set crime saga which follows the swaggering members of the Vandals, a ramshackle motorcycle club led by Tom Hardy’s formidable Johnny and his protégé, Butler’s volatile Benny. It’s the latter whom Kathy spots in a bar and swiftly marries, turning her quiet life upside down in a blaze of motorc.