On Movies: Happy to play her, wouldn't want to be her

'Oh God,

come on

Julia,

come on

," is what

Hayley Atwell

remembers saying to herself - frustrated, exasperated - as she pondered the character written in

Evelyn Waugh's

Brideshead Revisited

. "That's not a life that I'd really want to live."

That life belongs to Julia Flyte, whom Atwell plays in the new adaptation of Waugh's classic novel of love and class, religion and desire in pre-World War II Britain. A young woman of privilege and wealth, Julia was beautiful, sexy, and locked into a world ruled by a controlling mother (

Emma Thompson

) and the Catholic Church.

When the handsome interloper Charles Ryder (

Matthew Goode

) arrives, Julia has the chance to change the course of her life.

"She's hard work," Atwell says with a sigh. "Julia's so trapped by where she's from, and she can't ever quite break free from that."

Brideshead Revisited

, directed by

Julian

Jarrold

, and starring

Ben

Whishaw

as Julia's tormented sibling, Sebastian, opened Friday at the Ritz Five and the Showcase at the Ritz Center/NJ. Atwell - in town recently to talk up the movie - feels passionately about her role, but that's not the same as feeling an affinity for Julia.

"I wanted to say, 'Run off with Charles!' and of course, she doesn't," she says. "But the final decision that she makes to leave Charles is actually an incredibly strong one. It's not that she's just going back to her mother. She's seen a miracle, she believes, on her father's deathbed, and she feels that that is a calling from God. It's an act of faith and sacrificial love."

Brideshead Revisited

is only Atwell's second theatrical release. Her first was

Woody Allen's

Cassandra's Dream

- a tale of murder, money and seduction in which the actress, radiating intoxicating allure, was cast with

Colin Farrell

and

Ewan McGregor.

Atwell, dark-haired, with honey-colored eyes, had just graduated from drama school when she read for the part in Allen's U.K.-set drama.

"Loads and loads and loads of actresses were auditioning for him," she remembers. "You just go into this room and you're given about three lines of dialogue and all you have to do is look at the person that's reading with you, do the dialogue, and then leave. You have no sense of who the character is, what the film is called or who the other actors are, or what the situation is.

"And I left thinking that was hideous, I'm never going to work again, I don't want to be an actor anymore!"

Two weeks later, Atwell got a phone call saying Woody wanted to meet with her in New York. "They flew me out there and I spoke to him for about a half an hour, and he just said I want you to play Angela and that was it. Very quick."

He was just as quick once they began shooting back in England.

"He doesn't talk," she says of Allen. "There's no rehearsal, there's no read-through, there's no socializing. You do it in two or three takes and you go home at 4 o'clock in the afternoon."

Atwell, 26, grew up in London's Notting Hill section. Her mother is English (and named her daughter after

Hayley Mills

), her father American and part American Indian. The parents divorced when she was little, and Atwell, through childhood and adolescence, spent her summers in Missouri, with her father's side of the family.

"I absolutely loved it. Compared to England it's so flat, and the heat is so dense and humid. . . . I loved the smell of it. There was a real magic there for me," she says.

"It was exactly what I imagined America to be like: All the kids go to the poolhouse, they hang out and do basketball and do cheerleading and they drive at the age of 16 and they're called things like Todd and Brittany, and they all have blond hair and perfect teeth. . . .

"And what they ate was different and what they watched was different. They had basements that they called dens where they watched television, compared to these tiny shoebox houses that you get in London. . . .

"I remember writing in my diary,

Please speed up the year so I can get to Kansas City. I want my school year to end

.

"And I had my first kiss in Kansas City. It was really romantic."

And really, really not like Brideshead Castle. Atwell said it took a while to get used to the opulence of Castle Howard, the grand and historic family estate where

Brideshead Revisited

was filmed.

"It did half the work for us, because I had never, ever been around that kind of wealth before. . . . I had no concept of it at all. You have to walk through those corridors and imagine what it must have been like to be a kid, to be in that environment, and with that comes this sense of status. People with high status are very relaxed, and they don't have to do anything. There are people around them that do things for them. You feel anointed by God."

Atwell has yet to watch the 12-hour

Brideshead Revisited

mini-series that aired on PBS's

Masterpiece Theatre

a quarter of a century ago.

Diana Quick

had her role,

Jeremy Irons

played Charles, and

Anthony Andrews

was Sebastian. Fans of the series still swoon when they think about it, and when word got out that a two-hour movie version was in the works, the reaction was cool, if not hostile.

"I suppose that's true with every remake," she observes. "I'm a huge fan of

The Rocky Horror Show

, and every time it comes to London at Christmastime and they have a new

Tim Curry

- Frank N Furter - I get very protective because Tim Curry was so extraordinary, and I won't let it go. So I can understand the avid fans of the series will, just on principle, come with a preconceived idea of it not being what they want it to be. Which is perfectly fine."