Jet Trash's Sofia Boutella interview: 'I would have been happy just doing smaller movies. I think I got lucky'

The actress, who stars in the darkly comic crime-thriller 'Jet Trash' and in upcoming blockbuster 'The Mummy' next year with Tom Cruise, used to be a dancer on tour with Madonna for years, before making the transition to acting

Sofia Boutella stars in 'Jet Trash' and upcoming blockbuster 'The Mummy' with Tom Cruise (Getty)

In kick-ass performances Sofia Boutella stole the show in testosterone driven big-budget action films Kingsman: The Secret Service and Star Trek: Beyond. The buzz around the Algerian born actress is so great that film industry bible IMDB has listed her alongside Oscar winner Brie Larson, and Stranger Things stars Millie Bobby Brown and Natalia Dyer as one of the Top 10 Breakout Stars of 2016.

Now in her new film, British director Charles Henri Belleville’s whirlwind adventure Jet Trash, she shows her mysterious, alluring charms. No wonder Tom Cruise had her on speed-dial when he needed a nemesis for upcoming blockbuster The Mummy.

Jet Trash is based on Simon Lewis’s twisty thriller novel Go (1998), a literary favourite with adventurous backpackers. Boutella plays Vix, an alluring femme we first see in a London nightclub on the arm of a London gangster. When she heads to Goa in search of chancers Lee (Robert Sheehan) and Sol (Osy Ikhile) they know that trouble, both physical and romantic, is in store. Yet in another winning performance from Boutella, we’re never quite sure if she’s good or evil.

Sofia Boutella as Vix and Robert Sheehan as Lee in 'Jet Trash' had an on-set romance and are now a couple living in LA

“Vix was very interesting for me, because at the time I was doing roles that were action orientated and physically demanding,” says Boutella. “I wanted to work in India so that was also a plus. She is someone who is more realistic than a lot of the roles I’ve been playing. I found her very mysterious and it’s interesting when you play a character and you don’t know what foot they are dancing on. That’s a French expression. ”

There was also an on-set romance. Director Belleville recalls Boutella and Sheehan reading a scene where they kiss for the first time, “I was expecting them to stop performing before they kissed, but then they just started kissing and it was clear that something more was afoot.”

She says of boyfriend Sheehan, who lives in Los Angeles with her, “He’s a really nice guy. We have a great chemistry and it was only natural that we explore it because India is such a magical place and whenever you experience something like that you’d be silly not to go for it, especially in such a paradise context, you think, yeah, why not.”

Born in April 1982, Boutella’s father is a composer and her mother is an architect who also paints. Her whole family is very artistic, her brother also acts and extended family members work in visual effects. “That was how home was,” she recalls. But dancing was her first love. “As a child I would say that I wanted to become a dancer to honour music. For me, dancing is the physical translation of the audio recording.”

Her young life was disrupted in December of 1991 when a civil war started in Algeria and soon after her family moved to Paris.

“When that happened I was 10 years old,” says the Jet Trash star. “It’s hard for a 10-year-old to understand the complexity of a civil war and what it means. At that age moving to Paris meant that I would get access to more candy and toys. Then in my adolescence, I realised what it meant, especially for my parents to move at their age and how lucky I was, to be able to be going to a school in France to learn dance. And to get the opportunities that I had as a teenager.”

She studied ballet from the age of 7, but then in her teenager years turned to hip-hop and street style. She bats away any thought that this was done as a sign of rebellion. “I’m not rebellious,” she says. “I try to be rebellious but I don’t walk around being rebellious for no reason. I think I just did ballet for a long time when I was young and I just saw another type of dance that I was attracted to. I went for it, because I thought there are a little less rules than in ballet, although there are still some rules, but there is a freedom that came with it that I appreciated at the time. Because I think that I’m seriously independent and open for adventure.”

It also brought success; she was picked to appear in a Nike campaign, appeared in a number of music videos (Jamiroquai, Rhianna, Michael Jackson and Take That) and toured with Madonna: “I met Madonna when I was 22 and I danced with her until I was 28. When I met her I was a tomboy! Every time I see her she really inspired me about one thing or another, so she’s quite important and significant person in my life.”

Despite all the success as a dancer, Boutella decided to make the transition to acting, not working for two years while she went to auditions and continued acting lessons in the Stella Adler method in Los Angeles where she had moved. She had already acted in a couple of small roles in France when she was 17, but stopped aged 20 to concentrate on dancing. “I thought like I was parked with my butt on two chairs and hadn’t fulfilled my desire to dance at the time.”

But the dance background has come in useful in her acting career. When she took on the now iconic role of Gazelle in Kingsman, a fighting machine with bladed prosthetic legs, she says she approached the role by concentrating on the character’s movement. The legs were computer generated in post-production but on set she asked the costume designer to give her very high stilettos to mimic the effect of walking on a small surface. It’s why she walks with a bounce in the film.

There is a larger-than-life quality to the stunning Boutella, which makes it no surprise that sci-fi and fantasy filmmakers have been quick to call on her. Although she says, “I would have been happy just doing smaller movies. I think I got lucky.”

Boutella plays Vix in 'Jet Trash' - we are never sure if she is good or evil

She had to do some cramming for the Star Trek movie as she'd never seen the TV show, but it was a different story for The Mummy. “I absolutely loved the original 1930s film with Boris Karloff, and when I first read the script I wondered whether it would be like that film or the Brendan Fraser films it would take after. When I met with director Alex Kurtzman he said it would be honouring the original film and Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe were on-board.”

She describes working with Cruise in laudatory terms and adds that they had great giggles on set. But it’s talking about Karloff that stokes her fire. “Karloff was a phenomenal actor, he was able to humanise these characters. He played a lot of monsters and strange creatures. He had this humanity in the way he acted that made all these characters so fascinating to watch. With me playing ‘The Mummy’ I thought I needed to find that quality because playing a monster is not enough, we need to find why monsters are monsters, that is what is interesting to me.”

Boutella loves old classic films, which she puts down to her mum watching the Arte television channel at home in France. She recalls that as a child she would roll her eyes at the old, obscure, weird, strange films that were always playing on their TV. Her attitude changed the day she became transfixed by Wings of Desire and as her attraction to old classic movies developed, so started a love affair with Tarkovsky: “That is the ballet of filmmaking and I love to have those references in my brain.”

Her popularity is such that she is now constantly fielding offers. 2017 promises to be a bigger year than this one. In addition to The Mummy she has completed filming on David Leitch’s The Coldest City co-starring Charlize Theron and James McAvoy. It’s a Cold War thriller set on the eve of the collapse of the Berlin Wall based on Antony Johnston’s 2012 graphic novel.

After the political and societal divisions seen in electoral votes in 2016, and with the spectre of a Le Pen presidency in her French homeland next year, she sees the period in 1989 as, ”A reminder of a time that people got together socially and artistically to battle divisions when the power of the people really shone through.”

'Jet Trash' is out now