Beautiful Haley Bennett strikes gold in 'Magnificent Seven'
Actress' career takes off with a sextet of big movies.
TORONTO — Haley Bennett is having a season for the ages.
The 28-year-old actress is the female lead in Antoine Fuqua's update / remake of The Magnificent Seven (opening Friday), kicking off a fall lineup of major roles in The Girl on the Train (October) and director Warren Beatty's Rules Don't Apply (November), and opposite Jessica Biel and Patrick Wilson in A Kind of Murder (December).
Already in the can for 2017 are the PTSD drama Thank You for Your Service, with Miles Teller and Amy Schumer, and Terrence Malick's Weightless.
Bennett launched her career a decade ago as a Britney Spears-like pop singer opposite Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore in Music and Lyrics. She has worked steadily since, but it took Fuqua and a supporting role in his reimagining of The Equalizer to propel her to stardom.
She seemed a bit awed by it all at the Toronto International Film Festival this month as she bopped from TV to online to print interviews and photo shoots for The Magnificent Seven. All her newfound media responsibilities even forced her to turn down a part in another movie.
A fan of old films, Bennett said she was never interested in westerns growing up and "was very upset when I arrived on set and found out how excited and exuberant everybody else was," she said at Toronto's new Four Seasons Hotel.
By everybody, she meant all the men, who had enjoyed and been influenced by westerns since boyhood.
"I asked myself, 'Why don't I get to share in that same excitement?' and it's because women's roles didn't exist in old westerns," she said. "There's no female role in the [original] Magnificent Seven. And in Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which was a big inspiration for us, there are no female roles besides one of the villager's daughters.
"So it was really exciting to a portray a strong independent female character in a western - somebody that I can aspire to be like. She's in control. She's nowhere near a damsel in distress. She's a leader."
Bennett believes her Emma Cullen "is a very accurate portrayal of what women were actually like" a century before our society became filled with soft, overfed desk jockeys.
"Think about how independent these women had to be, with their men off hunting or trading or at war, dying. They lost a lot of people during the migration to the West."
To prepare for her role, Bennett said she went through about three months of training. "I rode horses every day, I shot guns every day ... and I also took on boxing," she said.
The boxing training wasn't to learn how to throw a jab or a hook, but merely to look like a woman who could, and would, punch someone.
"I needed to feel that my character could have thrown a punch if she was pushed into it, and I wanted to have the right body structure so that Emma wouldn't look like she would blow away in the wind," she said.
Her character's need for strength comes early on in Seven, when she watches Peter Sarsgaard's evil land baron shoot her husband (Matt Bomer) outside a church.
"That was a very difficult scene," Bennett said, "one that we shot many times. It brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it."
Another scene shot at the church, in which it burns, also had a tremendous impact."It was [shot at] the same time as the church killings in Charleston. It was very haunting to be in that church."
As for The Girl on the Train, Bennett said she read Paula Hawkins' best seller as her refuge on Magnificent Seven, "working on the set with seven brutes," before quickly adding, "They're not actually brutes."
"I picked up the book because it involved three female narrators, and I was like, 'Sweet! This is right up my alley. This is exactly what I need. I need some female infusion in my life,' " she said.
"So I read the book and, coincidentally, I received a call that Tate Taylor (The Help) wanted to meet me and that he was adapting the book. I had just finished it in two days - everyone I've talked to has finished that book in two days; it's like a race to the finish line.
"I shot Girl about three weeks after I finished The Magnificent Seven."