Belgravia star Alice Eve reveals she doesn’t mind ‘flashing the flesh’ on screen
BELGRAVIA star Alice Eve is used to controversial, racy storylines.
The stunning actress left fans of the hit ITV period drama enthralled when her character Susan got pregnant after having an affair with a married man.
And Alice, 38 — who romped naked with co-star Ray Liotta in 2009 flick Crossing Over and played hot Irish nanny Erin in 2010 film Sex And The City 2 — insists she is not afraid to dress daringly for roles.
She said: “I don’t have any aversion to flesh or showing it. I think if you’ve got flesh then it should be shown.
“Besides, you limit yourself if you are against all that because it’s part of the job really. But it can be a bit weird sometimes.”
Alica also said: “The roles I used to be cast for typically objectified women, so I was always being shown through the lens of the guy.
“It was nice to have a blowout and everything but that’s not really how I thought of myself or how I feel inside.”
BOLD CHOICES
Despite her character’s affair, Alice’s role in Belgravia — which concluded last weekend with five million viewers — is much more demure than the sexy vixen nanny who many will remember her playing in cult movie Sex And The City 2.
But Alice — daughter of Waking The Dead actor Trevor Eve and Holby City actress Sharon Maughan — is open to any role, even if it means substantially changing her body.
She said: “As an actor, you can’t be attached to your physicality.
“You’ve got to be willing to change it, whether it’s to gain weight, lose weight, change your hair, change your eyebrows.
“You really change yourself. I did a film with my brother which was set in the 1930s, and I dyed my eyebrows like Rihanna from that Vogue cover recently — they looked pencil thin, like ’30s brows.”
And it was no different for her role in Belgravia, which is set in Victorian London. She added: “It was about an hour and a half in make-up and an hour in costume, so two and a half hours in total.
“I had to wear a corset too, and once it was on it was ON. You couldn’t really lie down and have a rest during breaks. You just had to power through.”
Alice hopes the drama — one of ITV’s most streamed this year — comes as a welcome relief from the unrelenting virus lockdown.
She said: “You can never predict success but it is zeitgeist, isn’t it?
“I certainly hope we entertain, because I believe my role as an actor is to entertain.
My character is a modern woman in a Victorian drama. She has the balls of a modern woman
“I hope we give an escape, because it is not the easiest time in the world.
“My character is a modern woman in a Victorian drama. She has the balls of a modern woman, and makes the choices we are all encouraging each other to make at the moment — bold choices.”
And when talking about similarities between Belgravia and Downton Abbey — both created by writer Julian Fellowes — she added: “I think it inhabits a slightly darker universe.
There is definitely more scandal.” Alice has told how seeing her parents’ success as actors made her want to follow in their footsteps, and she was always a performer at school.
She said: “I did know I wanted to be an actor. I guess I was always a little bit of an extrovert.
“I used to lift up my skirt as a three-year-old. I did get in trouble a lot in school. As much as I enjoyed school, I suppose I didn’t see the point at the same time, so that was a bit of stress for me.
“But I think that gave me the impetus to move forward. I had a maths teacher who told me that with a brain like mine I’d really better leave school now.
"I think she is the reason I did all right in school, because after that I decided to work and I got into Oxford University. She was called Miss Mold. When she used to turn her back, we used to go down in the chair and simulate sex.”
Despite her parents’ initial attempts to dissuade her from acting, Alice was never deterred from her ambition. She said: “For a period when I was growing up, my parents tried to put me off. ‘Acting is a terrible life, don’t do it’, they warned.
“And yet I saw the joy they derived from it. They loved watching plays and talking about them and their own performances.
STAR POWER
“The turning point for me was landing my first major film role in She’s Out Of My League [a 2010 romantic comedy]. I realised then that I was in the business and that film would be my life.”
Alice went on to wow in Sex And The City 2 alongside Sarah Jessica Parker, 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness with Benedict Cumberbatch, and in 2018 BBC1 Agatha Christie three-parter Ordeal By Innocence.
In 2017 her world was rocked by divorce from husband Alex Cowper-Smith after two years but it gave her life a kick-start.
She said: “I think that after the divorce I took my life a little bit more seriously, because you have to face endings in a way — death in one thing, but an ending in your own chapter.
“It’s so clearly placed there for you with divorce. I looked forward suddenly and was like, ‘Where do I want to be at 45? What do I want to have or not have in my life?’.
“You can kind of streamline a little bit. I think I valued my family a lot more and didn’t take it for granted. It was a rebirth.”
Alice has previously told how before her marriage she was never a big fan of dating, recalling of one disastrous encounter: “There was a guy who invited me to his birthday and then his cake came out and it was a big penis shape.
"I thought, ‘I’m not sure if this guy is someone I want to hang out with’.”
Though she is now one of the nation’s brightest acting talents, Alice has previously admitted getting starstruck upon meeting some big names.
When asked who, she said: “Probably Will Smith, in terms of star power, when I did Men In Black 3. He radiates it and it’s a crazy thing.
'DON'T WATCH MYSELF'
“And also he keeps your set going. People get tired and everyone’s standing around, and he goes, ‘Hey, everyone, how about a little rap?’.
“And he’ll just go into it and start rapping and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I could never do it’.
“There’s hundreds of crew and extras and aliens. He just keeps it entertained. You wonder how he does it, where his energy comes from.”
Despite stealing the show as Susan in Belgravia, Alice will not be binge-watching the series — nor any other.
She said: “I don’t tend to watch myself because I like to live in a detached imaginative space, and that brings me crashing down to reality.
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“I rarely watch anything in one go, I like to dip in and out.
“This idea of binge-watching sounds rather unhealthy. The word ‘bingeing’ reminds me of eating or drinking — teen binge-drinking, which isn’t a good thing.”
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