‘Why I wanted to be like Al Pacino’

With no female actors to look up to growing up in Iceland, rising star Hera Hilmer — the star of big budget dystopian drama Mortal Engines — was forced to take inspiration from male roles.

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Hera Hilmar has done an incredible job of flying under the Hollywood radar — until now. Google the Iceland-born actor’s name and you’ll get a few results, but not what you’d expect for a young actor with such an impressive resumé. But that’s just the way Hilmar, 29, likes it.

She believes it perfectly represents the evolution of her career and the journey she’s taken to get to where she is. “I take it as a compliment — that’s just the world I come from,” she tells Insider.

“I didn’t really go running to Hollywood, that was never really the plan (but) it’s nice to be there now. For me that’s been a nice transition and I think I needed that rather than going really young to LA.”

Hera Hilmar as Hester Shaw in Mortal Engines.

Hilmar stars in the upcoming Peter Jackson-produced Mortal Engines, a leading role that will see her Google footprint increase exponentially in coming weeks.

It’s a big-budget dystopian fantasy based on Philip Reeve’s novel of the same name and Hilmar plays Hester Shaw, a young woman on a mission to track down the man who killed her mother years before.

It’s a career-changing role and all the more surprising given Hilmar initially had no intention of tackling Hollywood at all.

Her parents are both significant players in the film industry back home — her mother a well-known actor and her father a respected director.

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Hilmar’s interest in acting developed at a young age and while her parents’ careers were an ever-present part of her upbringing, she is adamant they didn’t pressure her into following in their footsteps.

“My parents really did not push me into this, they were very protective in that way,” she says. “It was around the age of 16 when I was getting to a place where it was seriously important for it to be acknowledged by my parents that I was serious and not just trying to be them.”

A lack of strong female leads on the screen, both at home and in the Hollywood films she watched as a teen, meant she often looked to male influencers.

“When I was younger in a weird way I used to kind of look more up to male actors because I was watching so many movies in a time when the male roles were way more often the more interesting ones,” she says. “Like Al Pacino was a big thing for me for a long time.”

Hilmar attends the world premiere of the movie at Cineworld Leicester Square in Longond last week. Picture: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images

Looking back she says she’s disappointed women weren’t better represented.

“It’s just crazy to be a woman in this world and not be represented in our entertainment,” she says. “No wonder a young girl goes and says ‘I want to be like Al Pacino’.”

After being noticed during a school play, she received roles in local productions, earning a coveted Edda (the most prominent film and television awards in Iceland) nomination for her debut movie, The Quiet Storm, and had her mind set on staying in her home country and carving out a career there. But she soon realised that wasn’t for her.

“My plan was always to train in Iceland because that’s just sort of what you did if you wanted to be an actor,” she says. “But when it came to it, it was just way too close to home and I felt like I could see my life ahead of me and it just freaked me out. So I decided to go to London.”

After the move she watched her star rise internationally, scoring a recurring role in television series Da Vinci’s Demons before starring opposite Ben Kingsley in The Ottoman Lieutenant. Kingsley is then said to have personally requested her in The Ordinary Man. Then came a huge break in the form of Hester Shaw and the $100 million Mortal Engines.

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Working with a giant of the industry like Peter Jackson initially made Hilmar nervous, but she soon learned the Kiwi and his team, including director Christian Rivers and co-scriptwriter Philippa Boyens, was a lot more fun than she expected.

“I was prepping myself for this film to be this big machine and I would be controlled by the machine, just because of the nature and the size of the film and all the practical elements to it,” she says. “But he (Jackson) has created a really nice environment to make films.”

There has been some controversy over the physical appearance of Hilmar’s character in the film. In Reeves’ book, Shaw is severely disfigured, her nose almost gone and her mouth permanently frozen into a snarl. In the movie, she still has significant scarring from a violent encounter as a young girl, but it is much more visually palatable.

Boyens explained to Insider last week that the difference was necessary to allow Shaw to communicate properly and tell her story on screen, and Hilmar agrees.

“It’s one thing in the book but it’s different when you’re making a film just because of the nature of how it’s being told,” she says. “You have a big, huge screen in front of you as opposed to words where you create the image in your head.”

MORTAL ENGINES OPENS THURSDAY

Originally published as ‘Why I wanted to be like Al Pacino’