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It’s safe to say that there’s no one in Hollywood like Kate Beckinsale—an English rose plucked from the damp and loamy soil of ye olde England and now thriving among the succulents on the sun-basted hillsides of Hollywood. Kate Beckinsale is an icon whose every move is watched by millions. If on a whim she decides to stick googly eyes on her cat (as well as herself) it causes a social media riot. What she appears to be on the surface: a vivacious bombshell with a wicked sense of humor—is only a smidgeon of the story. Her petals cover steel. Versatile and hardworking, she’s a real, bonafide movie star, able to bring the glamor of Ava Gardner for Martin Scorsese in The Aviator as ably as she garners awards for playing a working class mother in the harrowing British drama Farming. Personable and polite, caring and concerned, she’s a star but not a diva. Rather, she’s an extremely private person who has built up an inescapable public persona, and is very aware of the paradox. At time of writing, Kate Beckinsale has 5.3 million followers on Instagram. This level of audience participation is perhaps our modern day equivalent of the hysteria of the star system of Hollywood’s misty past. In the 1930s, at the height of her fame, Shirley Temple’s Fanclub only had 3.8 million members. Fans used to send thousands of letters a week to the studios demanding their favorite actresses get bigger parts—it was called ‘boosting.’ Studio boss David O. Selznick would have these fan letters scanned in case he had missed any potential stars on his roster. After a particular hit film in 1928, a young Joan Crawford attempted to personally reply to every one of her thousands of letters. Today, fans and stans alike can tweet, critique, and comment as much as they like without ever licking a stamp. Tangoing with Hollywood dreams in the 21st century, 2022 sees Kate Beckinsale herself regularly reading and responding to her fans—with dazzling wit and alacrity. We discuss this complex form of engagement, some of on her memorable roles, and the weird questions one is asked as a woman is Hollywood, in a meandering conversation one Friday evening in April, as the breezes kicked up and summer commenced its foreplay here in Southern California.

HERMÈS top and ROBERTO COIN earrings, necklace, and ring.

Based on your Instagram, you seem to enjoy every single day of your life, and also enjoy sharing that with everyone.

Not every single day…What I should say first, is that my Instagram is largely to amuse my mother who is in England. And I know that when she wakes up in the morning, the first thing she’ll do is see what I’ve been up to. If I find something that’s kind of fun, or funny, or cute, it’s largely aimed at my mum. So the fact that other people enjoy it is good, but that’s what it’s mainly for. One of the things I found surprising and refreshing about Instagram is that this is the first time in my whole career that it’s just me, it’s not written by someone else, it’s not edited by someone else.

Have you noticed that each time you make your funny clapbacks to the trolls, entire ‘news’ articles are generated? I respect that you take the time to even reply at all.

We all scroll through, and go, ‘Oh dear, I really don’t like that outfit,’ and then, if we have any manners, we just continue scrolling. I cannot fathom ever saying something nasty. I can imagine thinking, ‘Well, I don’t really like her or his whatever’—sure, we’re not saints. But just to actually go out of one’s way to write something like that… Somebody did one today, on the post about my daughter’s movie. He said, ‘When I saw the trailer, I thought it looked shit.’ And I’m like, ‘How nice of you to feel that we all need to hear your shitty weird opinion.’

You describe yourself as “genuinely a technophobe.” And yet the impact of these posts and exchanges is surreally impactful. Nonetheless, this digital conquest wasn’t planned, right?

I was very late to the table with social media. I had no interest in Instagram at all. I was also very, very wedded to my Nokia flip phone. I had it for an embarrassingly long time. I bypassed the whole BlackBerry era—I didn’t go near it. But then I did Love and Friendship (2016) and it was a small movie, and I loved that movie, and it needed some help [getting out there]. So I reluctantly got Instagram and went to a company that does some quite fancy people’s Instagrams. They said, ‘We do it all for you.’ But that was just not my vibe. I was never doing any of their suggestions—I’m not going to be doing a planned photoshoot in my kitchen for St. Patrick’s Day. I was there for a week. I’m just not that person: I’m going to see the cat doing something funny, video it, and then post it. I’m not somebody who’s planning it all out. See, I’m not good at planning, that’s turning out to be the theme today…I’ve not got a calculated social media presence.

DUNDAS dress and ROBERTO COIN earrings, necklace, bracelets, and rings.

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Family is key to understanding Beckinsale. Brought up in London thespian circles, actor father Richard Beckinsale was the star of popular British TV classics including the beloved BBC prison sitcoms Porridge and Going Straight with Ronnie Barker. Her father’s premature passing clearly still deeply affects Beckinsale today. Her current Instagram bio quote is poignant: “A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe.” Beckinsale’s mother, Judy Loe, now 75 and also an actress, is not just the target audience, but a frequent feature of her feed too, as is her stepfather, television director Roy Battersby, who just celebrated his 86th birthday. Her daughter with actor Michael Sheen, Lily Mo Sheen (who played the young Beckinsale, Selene, in Underworld: Evolution) debuted this month as the daughter of Nic Cage’s character (Nick Cage) in quirky new meta-feature The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Beckinsale refers back to Lily, 23 to Kate’s ageless 48, with pride throughout our chat: “She took me driving which was slightly hair-raising as she’s a baby and she can drive and I can’t, so it always feels a bit weird.” Beckinsale started her own journey to Hollywood in her late teens when reading French and Russian literature at Oxford was interrupted for her to play the peachy Hero in 1993’s Much Ado About Nothing directed by Kenneth Branagh. Upon the film’s release, there was much ado about something, and that something was Kate.

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Do you think that studying like you did at Oxford was useful for acting when you were starting out?

I think it really was. I had a very literary approach. And at that time in England—I never really anticipated working outside of Europe—I certainly didn’t think about America ever. It was pre-social media, pre-everything. America was where you went to Disneyland once in your life if you were lucky, and that was kind of it. It just seemed really far away. And so I was mainly doing Shakespeare, or Jane Austen, and various adaptations of things. And to me, that is what acting was.

Those high-cultural parameters were only to apply for a very short while: the wider world was beckoning you away from your comfort zones.

I had been workshopping a play with Patrick Marber, which ended up being Closer with Mark Strong, Stephen Dillane, and various people in London. They asked me, ‘Do you want to do this play, we’re going to put it on at the National.’ I did want to, but I also got offered Last Days of Disco at the same time…And so I had to sit there going, ‘Alright, what’s the scariest one?’ Because I thought that would be good criteria for picking. And because it was American, and it was in New York, and my boyfriend couldn’t visit me because he was doing a play, and my mum couldn’t visit me because she was doing a play, I was like Fuck—I’m so prone to being panicky’—almost agoraphobic—‘better do the more difficult one now, or my career path is going to be ruled by anxiety.’

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And Last Days of Disco it was. After conquering her neophyte jitters, now came the hard part—becoming effortlessly American onscreen. To inform her performance as the intellectual Charlotte in Whit Stillman’s clever party scene parable, she went deep undercover in the nightclubs of Manhattan with co-star and nightlife native Chloë Sevigny.

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It’s been some time since that role, but describe the attempt to onboard all that American-ness?

I’ve always liked language and liked accents and things like that, and Last Days of Disco was my first part with an American accent. It was a very specific milieu of a very specific type of people, and I didn’t know anything about that. Chloë was sort of ‘of that’ whole type, and she very generously let me follow her around New York. It was a little bit hairy, because I was straight out of Chiswick, but I was in great hands.

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At this point of the Kate Beckinsale origin story, a cat sneezes loudly off-camera. But this is not just any cat. This is Clive. Beckinsale dashes over to make sure he is alright, and brings him back over to say hello. He’s a distinguished Persian fellow wearing a pale blue shirt with a white collar and cuffs, from which tufts of his light grey fur jauntily extrude. “Sorry. He’s having allergies,” she informs us.

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That’s the famous Clive, right? You seem to be the ultimate combination of cat mother, cat supporter, and cat companion.

What I find really interesting is that there’s a certain strata of men, which I only know from my Instagram, who are deeply threatened by a woman having a close relationship with an animal, really of any kind, but most particularly a cat.

It’s that old trope of the ‘mysterious, inscrutable woman, and her Familiar.’

To be fair, I’ve not had an actual boyfriend that has ever minded the cat. And I’ve found that on social media, it’s just a lot less triggering for me to post a picture of a cat than a boyfriend. Now I would never post a picture with a boyfriend. I would never tell anyone I had a boyfriend. I don’t need that, ever again, thanks very much. But yeah, they can get really triggered about it. I get told often, ‘You know, it’s really sad and pathetic that you have a cat instead of a child—you should have a child.’ Meanwhile, my actual child is grown up, and I feel I’ve done that to the best of my ability. I can’t imagine being triggered by a man having a pet anything, really.

It’s an unsettling dichotomy for sure. Let’s get back to the Beckinsale-takes-Hollywood story. Another big early film for you was the Henry James adaptation and beautiful Merchant Ivory concoction, The Golden Bowl. What sentiments still resound?

James Ivory is just the most elegant, lovely, sweet person. I loved him so much. It was my first movie back after having a baby. I was so young having a baby, and relatively unprepared, I just thought, ‘How is all of this going to work?’ I was still breastfeeding and was a different size and shape to what I normally was. I got cast as kind of ‘the frumpy one.’ Looking back, I can see that I became a totally different incarnation of myself—‘Now that I’ve had this baby, I’m just never going to be the same person ever again.’ It was a weird feeling, and it was so nice to have that with him, and I loved Nick Nolte and Anjelica Houston too, they were just lovely people to have near you when you were feeling like you were halfway through some kind of weird transformation and got stuck.

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After this reminiscence, Beckinsale becomes quite thoughtful. For someone who starred in a film called Serendipity, (her 2001 Miramax rom-com opposite John Cusack), she’s highly attuned to patterns and the ways in which the puzzle pieces of her life have fallen together into the picture they have.

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So, in reflecting on those influential moments, does it all feel like things fell into place the way they were meant to?

I think the thing about me is that I’ve never had a career plan— which I’m sure has probably been to my career’s detriment. But also, I always think that with any kind of creative career, it’s something that you also have to be surprised by, and you shouldn’t plan it. Anything vocational like that—it’s like being in one of those old adventure game books, where you’d have to turn to certain pages, and if you do this, it’s one thing, and if you do that, it’s another, and you end up with a totally different narrative.

Those were ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books. I used to love them.

Yes, me too. And I feel a bit like that. You create these very significant experiences. You’re offered a movie on a certain theme, at a certain time, and it isn’t maybe necessarily the exactly perfect right thing to do, but it often sort of is, in terms of your life.

Your range as an actress is quite spectacular. But if people are only ‘into’ one type of film, then they wouldn’t necessarily see the other genres to realize that.

I think I’ve been doing it long enough that I’ve sort of now come back around again; I’m doing Jane Austen again. But sometimes I go, ‘Actually, not that many people are doing action movies and comedies and dramas, and all this.’ I don’t think I get enough credit for having a range; I’ve just quietly been doing things. The ones where you end up on the side of buses and have their own McDonald’s doll—those are the ones that tend to stick in people’s memories. That’s very much the smallest part of what I’ve actually done—just that those ones will stick out a bit more, because there were action figures.

After putting in the work on all of your many action movies, is there any stunt that you are most proud of being able to do, still? I read that you did a lot of your own stunts in Total Recall (2012).

Doing it at all was so unlikely for me. It was never ever a plan. When I was first out in LA, I kept getting feedback from meetings where I was so delicate and fragile and English. I thought, ‘Ok, I can do that, but I don’t feel that I am intrinsically that.’ But clearly, they were not able to see me another way. And then I happened to get offered Underworld, which was not something that I had sought out at all. I had to call and make sure it wasn’t a mistake—I was like, ‘Do they know? Did they definitely mean to send this to me?’ And I really wasn’t sure that I’d be able to do it. I wasn’t particularly athletic at school, I did dance and ballet, but I hadn’t done anything like that. I got really intimidated watching Alien, or Linda Hamilton in The Terminator, thinking, ‘Fucking hell, they really have to be good at this.’ So I went off and did loads of training, and I was just a disappointment on every level. The way I ran was like a girl who’s trying to get out of hockey; the way I punched was like this [mimes a weak slap]. I really didn’t know how to do anything. So the whole first movie I just felt I was going to get fired everyday. Because I was a fraud, and I knew I was.

But when Vampire Warrioress Selene, resplendent in glossy black latex, is caught up in the whirl of cinema magic—suspension-of-disbelief, plus 360 degree motion capture—everything worked out fine?

Weirdly enough, I’d look at it playing back and go, ‘I’d buy that.’ I don’t feel cool doing it—I feel like I’m a kind of flailing chaotic mess who’s always about to get it wrong. But on screen, it actually looks buyable, it looks believable. Sometimes, you turn on the telly, one of the movies are on, and you go, ‘Oh wow, I actually did that flip with two machine guns through a hallway.’ I still wouldn’t imagine I’d be able to do that, but I guess I did it. It’s funny.

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The all-action, no holds barred, werewolf butt-kicking Kate was a hit, and in this business, success equal more of the same?

By the second one, you’d think I’d be more confident, but the expectations were much higher. They were like, [in a man’s gung-ho accent] ‘Ha! You know what you’re doing!’ And that’s actually gotten worse now. They’re all like, ‘Oh, she’ll be fine, she’s basically Jackie Chan.’ And I’m not. And yet, I think I did have good enough training, so it’s a bit like riding a bike now. I know when I started out all feminist-y in my Dr. Martens at Oxford, I never wanted to play the girl who is just having a shower and you know…

Gets stabbed to death?

Yes. I didn’t want that, and I felt kind of political about that. In my mind at the time it was definitely not, ‘I’m going to be jumping off buildings and killing people.’ But as a part of my work, I’m not mad at it. Even if the movies aren’t necessarily to your taste, even if you never watch the movies and you think they’re shit, I still think it’s good that they are there in the mix. There aren’t that many women with an action movie franchise that’s got five installments.

And the five films add up to more than the sum of their parts— in a butts-on-cineplex seats, brass tacks sense.

The most important thing for me, when it was getting made, was that it was a co-production between two production companies and two studios. And they were very, very anxious about making this movie that was an action movie with a female lead. And it was a real issue—they were very worried that it wasn’t going to work, that female-lead action movies didn’t work. And then of course when it did work…I look back, and I feel like nobody’s having that conversation now. And obviously, that’s not just me. I feel like there’s a group of women, like Angelina and Charlize, and me and Milla Jovovich, that have annihilated that as a conversation, and I’m really proud of that. Now we’ve got Wonder Woman and much more. A female-lead action movie is not a sure fire disaster, at all. I think it really needed to happen, in terms of the film industry becoming much more comfortable with women doing action. Actresses of my daughter’s generation aren’t hearing that conversation of like, ‘Whaa? But she’s female—is it going to work?’

So is the Kate Beckinsale of today a Feminist (of either capital F or small f persuasion)?

I do think there are daily, chipping-away-at-you consequences to living in a patriarchal society for everyone. And they’re worse for women, and they’re worse for women of color, and they’re worse for trans women—all of us are in that group. I saw a really nice thing that an engineer guy had written, did you see that? He was just graduating from college as an engineer, and he posted, ‘I just wanted to write this note to all the women in my class. We aren’t equal. I’ve never been asked a question of, you know: this isn’t a feminine career, why are you doing it? I’ve never experienced in my childhood being expected to not be noisy or not ask questions. We aren’t equal, and the fact that you’ve got here is a bigger achievement than the fact that I have because I’ve had no obstacles, and you have.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s such a lovely way to put it.’ I was really hoping he didn’t just write it in order to get laid. It’s true.

That’s quite a perceptive analysis of the current state of ‘equality.’

And that’s not to say we all have to be angry and pissed off all the time. I’ve noticed there’s a lot of various old blokes involved in being inappropriate on set, being taken off things, or fired at the moment. Eventually, if I ever do write a memoir… I would say that it was the Wild West even when I started, which isn’t actually that long ago. And not just sexually abusive, but also in terms of people being just generally abusive, horrible, screaming, shouting, and inappropriate. But if something happened back then, there was no framework in place to help you correct it. There was no one you could call. You could call your agent sobbing, going ‘Help!’ But they couldn’t really do anything. Things like that were just things you had to deal with.

How about in contexts like this? Do you think questions for actresses have changed, or are actresses still expected to answer a completely different type of question that would never ever be posed to an actor?

I think it’s changed a little bit. I know when I first started out, my biggest dread questions would be like, ‘What’s your beauty regime?’ and ‘What part of your body do you like the most?’—things like that. And you wouldn’t ask any leading man that question either. You wouldn’t ask anyone that question, because it’s fucking insane. I would never sit with someone and go, ‘Do you know what I love…’ and insert a particular exfoliant. If there is something that’s useful about social media, if there is some amazing product that you’re really excited about, we’re all assuming the person will post it. And it’s weird having my daughter come up through it, and me having to say, ‘Watch out, because if someone asks you what your favorite body part is, be prepared to say something incredibly neutral that doesn’t come and bite you in the ass. Do they ask men what their favorite body part is? Or do they always just assume it’s their penis, as all men are weird about their penises? I guess that’s just a given, so no one asks it.

Are you surprised when people are shocked that a person who looks like you can also have a sense of humor? That it’s somehow strange and abnormal, that an attractive actress shouldn’t be witty?

I wasn’t a very attractive child, and I was raised on some of the best comedies of all time. I would obsessively watch my dad’s shows after he died, and so I spent a lot of time with really top-drawer comedy. It was a prized thing in my house to be funny. Especially when traumatizing things happen— people tend to survive them by being funny, finding things funny, or looking for what’s funny. I do think that it still isn’t necessarily expected that a really handsome guy’s funny, or that a girl that you think is attractive can be funny.

MAX MARA top and bottom, GIUSEPPE ZANOTTI shoes, and ROBERTO COIN earrings, bracelets, and rings.

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Beckinsale’s next major feature film release will be the titular role in Prisoner’s Daughter, from director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown, Twilight). Currently, in the edit, this is to be one of Kate’s more gritty, dramatic turns on the screen.

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Tell me about Prisoner’s Daughter experience?

My character is a single mother who has this epileptic son, who is very bright. And she’s got various things that have suddenly gone wrong, and she’s broke, and she’s got an alcoholic, druggy ex-husband who’s problematic. She hasn’t spoken to her father for decades and has no interest in that. He’s in prison and has been for some time, but he has pancreatic cancer, and so they say: ‘Look, you can be released, but you have to be released to live with a family member.’ But he’s only got me and I hate him; we’re estranged. So he calls me, and I say, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ But because I’d be paid for it, I have this whole dilemma because I can’t really afford medicine for my son, so I end up uncomfortably having him coming to stay. It’s a really intense family drama.

We can’t wait to see it. So, what does the future hold for Kate Beckinsale? What does the future hold?

I hope it holds… [she breaks off to think for a moment, before a wry realization]… I think I’ve established today that I never know what the future holds… There are a couple of movies, which I can’t talk about yet, and also probably a play in London. I haven’t done theater since before I had Lily because after I had her, I wanted to be able to be home in the evenings to put her to bed. Now she doesn’t need to be put to bed, at least not by me. So I’d like to go back and do that, and it’s important to me to go and be near my parents who are there.

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One hopes the always-busy Beckinsale finds the time to, one day, sit down and compose a memoir. Publishers, step up and make her an offer she can’t refuse—finally unleashing her Oxford University-trained and decades pent-up literary talents. It’s sure to be a blockbuster—or at least cause a state-to-state ripple of belly laughs. And it might give some insight into the secret formula to being the feisty, fun, and genre-conquering phenomenon that is Kate Beckinsale. Until then, how might the actress continue to stay perpetually glowing, lithe, and positive, despite all of the slings and arrows outrageous fortune has thrown her way? Clean living, an inquiring mind, love of small animals, close family ties, a joyful embrace of all holidays which entail elaborate costumed dress up, and lots and lots of ‘no planning.’ Lastly, never go with the easiest option, but instead take on the most difficult, most impossible, the one which makes you most anxious. When you Choose Your Own Adventure, you never know what the next page will say.

Photographer: Frederic Auerbach
Stylist: Gorge Villalpando
Hair: Aaron Light at The Wall Group
Makeup: Chase Aston at Carol Hayes Management
Manicurist: Miwa Kobayashi
Flaunt Film: Hunter Lyon
Written by Hannah Bhuiya