THE PERFORMANCE

Landing your first leading role in a film eight months out of drama school isn’t bad going for any young actor, but when the director is Woody Allen and your costars include Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell and Tom Wilkinson, fortune is clearly in your favor.

After graduating from London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama in June 2005, Hayley Atwell’s biggest role had been as a politician’s daughter in the BBC adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel “The Line of Beauty,” although the drama hadn’t even aired when she attended an open casting session for “Cassandra’s Dream” in London. It was, she claims, an “excruciating” audition, so bad that she momentarily felt like quitting acting.

Three days later, her agent called. “Woody wants to meet you in New York. Can you go this weekend?” Atwell recalls her saying. So she flew to Manhattan and met with Allen, who gave her a script and solicited her opinion. Atwell called him back after a few hours, and he offered her the job on the phone. “It was very surreal,” she says.

“Cassandra’s Dream,” which opened in limited release Jan. 18, is another bleak morality tale from Allen and his third consecutive London-set film after “Match Point” and “Scoop.” Atwell plays Angela Stark, a scheming actress and girlfriend of McGregor’s Ian, who woos her with fancy (borrowed) cars and talk of opening a hotel in Los Angeles. But it’s a dream that requires funds.

When his habitual gambler brother, Terry (Farrell), loses big at poker, the pair are offered a way out of their respective dilemmas by a rich uncle (Wilkinson) who wants them to murder a business associate of his for money, which, for Terry, will pay off his debt, and, for Ian, will furnish his new life.

“She’s a catalyst for this dark journey that [Ian] goes on with his brother,” says Atwell, whose mother is English and father American. “She’s a young girl driven to get to Hollywood. He’s a guy who says, ‘I can do that for you,’ and within five minutes they’re saying, ‘I love you.’ She is the object of his desire, and if he can sustain this ridiculous, made-up lifestyle, then he can have her, and she gets sucked into that.”

While Atwell reveled in being Allen’s latest leading lady -- “I had a week of being called Woody Allen’s muse,” she says, grinning -- she found Angela’s lack of depth a trifle frustrating. “I couldn’t find an arc to her character,” she notes, “couldn’t find her journey.”

Allen’s seemingly customary practice of giving his actors little to no input regarding their performance, with very few takes, didn’t help matters.

“Both Ewan and I felt that even though he doesn’t say much, he’s very specific with what he wants,” Atwell says. “He will tell you exactly where he wants you to stand and he’ll choreograph it. There wasn’t much of an invitation, I felt, as an actor, to play.”

Nevertheless, she nails Angela’s predatory instinct, using her sexuality to get on -- something Atwell, who’s 25, says she can relate to from her teenage years.

“I’ve met people at parties like her, and it’s how quickly they can talk about themselves and how they use networking parties in a not very subtle way, furthering themselves, but not having the work to further themselves. The saving grace was she’s really clueless as to what’s going on.”

--

Where you’ve seen her

Before landing her role in “Cassandra’s Dream,” British drama school grad Hayley Atwell’s biggest role had been as a troubled politician’s daughter in the BBC’s “The Line of Beauty.” She will next be seen in “Brideshead Revisited,” opposite Matthew Goode and Ben Whishaw, and “The Duchess,” alongside Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes. The 25-year-old actress recently began rehearsals for Nicholas Hyter’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara” at London’s National Theatre.