The “ingenious” movie Vanessa Kirby called her “hands-down favourite film”
You would imagine that for any successful actor, the ideal way to manage your career would be to make plenty of serious, proper films that have people nodding and ‘hmm-ing’ on podcasts about the important issues they raise, but then also spend half your time making massive, globally successful blockbusters that keep your swimming pool clean, and this is basically what Vanessa Kirby has achieved.
Not many people can match the number of major film franchises that Kirby has starred in over the last decade, which not only include Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible but also Fast and Furious and Marvel’s Fantastic Four to boot. That’s a hell of a lot of popcorn munched and explosions rigged, and we haven’t even mentioned that she did Jupiter Ascending too, the Wachowski sci-fi that cost a fortune, but that’s because it’s dreadful.
All in all, it’s been a pretty impressive decade for Kirby, who as recently as 2013 was still mostly doing theatre work, a little bit of TV and the occasional small role in films like Richard Curtis’ not-very-good rom-com About Time. But then, things started to kick off for her when she was cast in Netflix’s royal drama The Crown as the fond-of-a-tipple Princess Margaret, AKA the queen’s sister.
It proved to be the making of her as she was first Bafta nominated for her performance and then won the award a year later, together with an Emmy nomination. By now, she was much in demand, and the big action films duly followed. However, an example of how Kirby could pivot to more high-brow fare came in 2020, when she took the lead in Pieces of a Woman, the tragic story of a woman trying to cope with losing a baby in a home birth.
Co-starring Shia LaBeouf, the film was widely acclaimed, especially for Kirby’s work, which pulled in a raft of award nominations for ‘Best Actress’, not least an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a win at the Venice Film Festival.
She immersed herself entirely in the role, something she is forging something of a reputation for doing after recently admitting she studied quantum mechanics in order to play Sue Storm in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
As for her own influences, they are pretty esoteric and quite a bit more leftfield than just ‘The Godfather is so great’. In an interview with Stylist, the actor said, “I love watching films. Victoria, a German heist movie, is my hands-down favourite film of the past couple of years. It was shot in one take and is ingenious”.
Released in 2015 on a budget of less than half a million dollars, the thriller brought in more than ten times that at the box office and was indeed shot in one continuous take, very early morning in Berlin, with most of the dialogue in the film improvised from a script just 12 pages long.
Kirby, meanwhile, is due to continue her success off the back of Fantastic Four: First Steps, which was much better than anyone could have hoped for, by appearing in both the upcoming Avengers movies, Doomsday and Secret War, the first of which is out in cinemas in December. She also has another film in development with the former ‘Winter Soldier’ himself, Sebastian Stan, a novel adaptation called Ruins.
