’If Tom Cruise can do it, then so can I,’ says The Mummy co-star Annabelle Wallis

ANNABELLE Wallis wasn’t intimidated by co-star Tom Cruise’s reputation for risk-taking behaviour in new film Mummy. In fact, she loved it.

Annabelle Wallis at the Spanish premier of The Mummy. Picture: Carlos Alvarez

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ANNABELLE Wallis wasn’t intimidated by co-star Tom Cruise’s reputation for risk-taking behaviour.

In fact, it was one of the reasons she signed up for The Mummy.

“I felt very determined to prove myself in that world,” says the 32-year-old English actor, perhaps best known, until now, as Henry VIII’s third wife Jane Seymour in Showtime’s production of The Tudors.

“I was very competitive with him. I thought: if you can do it, I can do it.

“I was interested in pushing myself physically because I hadn’t had a chance to do that yet. I hadn’t been in a project of this scope or size.”

Annabelle Wallis and Tom Cruise experience zero gravity for real in The Mummy.

With an estimated budget of $US125 million, The Mummy kicks off Universal Pictures’ Dark Universe franchise which will resurrect the studio’s back catalogue of classic monsters including Frankenstein (to be played by Javier Bardem) and The Invisible Man (Johnny Depp.)

Wallis got her wish — and then some — when the filmmakers agreed to Cruise’s crazy suggestion that, instead of cheating on a sound stage, they shoot a heart-stopping plane crash sequence in zero gravity.

Just viewing behinds-the-scenes footage of the stunt, which took two days to shoot and four high-altitude flights, is enough to induce motion sickness.

“Can you imagine how it felt doing that 64 times?” says Wallis, who happens to be the niece of the late Hollywood hellraiser Richard Harris (otherwise known as Dumbledore).

“Everybody vomited. It’s called the vomit comet in the science world and in the film world because you are expected to be sick.

“It’s very taxing on the body. The force, when you go out of the gravitational pull and back in, is like four times as intense. When you hit the ground, the impact is so great.

“But when you look back, you don’t remember all those things. It was fun!”

Wallis says she could handle anything Cruise dished up.

Part actor, part daredevil, Cruise is renowned for pushing the envelope when it comes to performing his own movie stunts — in Mission: Impossible 2, he scaled a cliff face, in Rogue Nation, he hung off the side of a plane.

“I think he felt safe knowing that he was with a girl that loved it just as much,” says Wallis.

“He knew he didn’t have to be too precious with me, that I could definitely handle it.”

Cruise plays Nick Morton, a soldier of fortune, in the modern-day reboot, which stars Sofia Boutella as the franchise’s first-ever female Mummy and Russell Crowe as Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde.

Wallis is the archaeologist from whom Morton has stolen a map that locates the whereabouts of the ancient Egyptian princess Ahmanet.

Wallis at the French premiere of The Mummy in Paris. Picture: Francois Mori

She confronts him tomb-side, just as Morton’s blundering plundering awakens the sleeping monster who unleashes her pent-up, thousand-year-old fury in a rampage that spreads all the way to contemporary London.

To ensure she wasn’t overawed by the scale of the production she had signed up for, Wallis literally treated Cruise like her big brother.

“You can either do the physical stuff or you can’t. I found it easy because (when I was a teenager) I wanted to do everything my older brother (Francis) did,” she says.

“He got a motocross bike and then I did. We rode horses, we did polo together. He joined a paintball team and then I followed.”

If the actor can identify any trend in her career thus far, which include roles in BBC TV crime drama Peaky Blinders and the horror film Annabelle, it’s a tendency to work with groups of men.

Wallis with co-star Sofia Boutella and Cruise at the Australian premiere in Sydney. Picture: Rick Rycroft

“That’s definitely an homage to my brother and his friends,” says Wallis, who dates Coldplay frontman Chris Martin.

“When you have grown up with men, you understand that that toughness is a lot of facade. If you can handle the energy they arrive with, which is the facade, you get through to the heart and that’s where it gets fun.”

Wallis’s ease with the rough-and-tumble nature of male behaviour also explains, perhaps, why she was relatively unfazed by Crowe’s red-carpet neck munching at the Sydney premiere of The Mummy.

“I definitely got a surprise,” she laughs. “He’s a goof.”

Wallis with Charlotte Salt (left) and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in The Tudors. Picture: ABC

And it makes sense of her enthusiastic thumbs-up for Guy Ritchie, who recently directed the actor in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

Wallis plays the rather mysterious Maid Maggie in Ritchie’s Camelot prequel, which features Charlie Hunnan in the title role and Jude Law as the legend’s power-hungry arch nemesis.

“She’s someone that might be one of the classic Arthurian females in the legend,” says the actor, hinting at a larger plans for the character if poor reviews don’t scuttle an envisaged franchise.

While the decision on future King Arthur films rests with the studio, Wallis is confident she will wind up making more films with the director of The Man From U.N. C. L. E and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

“I will definitely work with Guy again. We get along really well. There are many things we have been talking about.”

At least one of them, surely, will give Wallis an even larger slice of the action.

“That’s the next step,” says the actor with a glint in her eye.

“That’s definitely where I am planning to go.”

The Mummy premiere

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The Mummy opens on Thursday

Originally published as ’If Tom Cruise can do it, then so can I,’ says The Mummy co-star Annabelle Wallis