Talk about a “Happy-Go-Lucky” attitude.
Sally Hawkins, who stars as carefree spirit Poppy, cheerfully sat down for a one-on-one Herald interview at New York’s Regency Hotel – despite a broken collarbone.
Her starmaking turn in Mike Leigh’s new movie already has won her the Berlin Film Festival’s Best Actress award.
Trained at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Hawkins, 32, owes her career momentum to Leigh, who cast her in his last three films.
“It was quite scary when I graduated if I would get the work,” she said. “But I was lucky from the beginning.”
She was featured in the BBC TV series “Casualty” – “It’s the equivalent of ‘ER,’ but perhaps not quite so classy. It taught me everything I knew” – and then was discovered by Leigh. She made her feature debut as a low-rent hooker in his 2002 film “All or Nothing.”
In Leigh’s “Vera Drake” (2005) she shone as a repressed upper-class woman ending her pregnancy, and now in “Happy” she’s an ebullient schoolteacher.
Poppy, Hawkins cautioned, is hardly a simple Pollyanna.
“She’s so much more than the happy-go-lucky persona she puts out. I learned a great deal from her. She’s a primary-schoolteacher and just working with kids puts life in perspective. She cares totally about other people. And love, she’s all about love . . . What’s extraordinary about her is her ability to just flow through life and not worry about what may not happen,” Hawkins said.
