The Mummy is sitting across from me, telling me that I just “have to have the corn.” Not a mummy—the mummy: Sofia Boutella, the human actress behind The Mummy’s titular zombie. And if she wants the Mexican-style grilled corn, so be it. (She’s waited thousands of years for this shit!) We’re at Café Habana, what Zagat labels a “Hipster Cuban-Mexican Diner,” in Nolita, and Boutella wants something else: “They have amazing margaritas.” Then she laughs and leans in to make sure the recorder sitting on the table gets this part: “We’re about to get wasted.” (We do not get wasted.)
Though she’s less puckish and more vengeful as a long-dead corpse brought back to life by a nosy Tom Cruise than in person, it’s her real-life mischievous energy that makes her an on-screen standout—both in The Mummy and in her other 2017 role, injecting some vivacity into Atomic Blonde. In fact, she’s such a bright spot that she even warms the heart of Charlize Theron’s cold-blooded character, persuading Ms. Atomic Blonde not just to not kill her but to sleep with her, too.
On this chilly September afternoon, Boutella’s equally forceful offscreen gravity is contained in a chic Canadian tuxedo: an oversize blue denim jacket with the words “Cat Astrophy” on the back and baggy jeans cropped and frayed at the shin. She’s five feet five and petite—as a former professional dancer, she’s all purposeful motion and powerful grace, walking like a wave breaks. (When, on the way to Café Habana, we run into her famous street-artist friend JR, she elegantly hops on his motorized bicycle and poses for a photo in the middle of the street with an effortlessness that suggests if this whole movie-star thing doesn’t work out, she has a future as an Instagram icon.) And if there’s a running thread through her roles—which also include the character Gazelle in 2015’s Kingsman: The Secret Service (a double amputee with blades for legs)—it’s that athletic fluidity. Which is why, though she appreciates the roles, she’s loath to call this year a “breakout,” wanting to save that for when she ventures into a character that’s “completely foreign,” not so much based in beating Tom Cruise into oblivion with her mummy bandages.
“I feel like if you’re able to change your clothes”—metaphorically speaking—“then you should do that,” she says, her English dusted with a French accent, which she got growing up in Algeria and Paris. “There’s an art into transforming. And I want to be that canvas every single time.” (As if to prove her point, Boutella's rocking a new hairdo, a blonde bob, for her GQ shoot.)
This constant need for change makes being around Boutella a bit like running downhill, even when she’s sitting, eating Mexican corn. She’s inquisitive, constantly scanning the room, not-so-surreptitiously snapping photos of cute babies at adjacent tables—“I think her parents are going to be like, ‘Stop filming my kid!’”—or pulling out her phone to show me paintings she did as a 5-year-old and asking, “Isn’t that amazing?” (She throws the word “amazing” around so often that it would cheapen it were she not so genuinely amazed by everything she describes that way.)
It’s all part of what Boutella labels “physical, painful energy.” And though, as a kid, that “energy” once led her to steal a Dr. Dre CD from the mall, she more regularly dissipated it by going all Harold and the Purple Crayon on her home in Algeria. “My mom said, ‘Okay. This is your wall,’” she recalls. “‘You can draw anywhere.’” She’d run down the corridor, arms outstretched, crayons scrawling both sides.
But when she was 9 years old, her childhood was interrupted by the Algerian civil war. “You would have a bomb exploding every once in a while,” she says. Water was available only for a few hours every week, and Boutella remembers her mother stocking jerricans—those plastic containers you fill up with gas after your car’s tank hits empty—when it did. There was no butter, bread, bananas, Coca-Cola, or candy in the shops, an absence she discovered when her family moved to France. Her response? “WOAH! What the fuck! This is amazing.”
It was also in France that Boutella caught her first big break as a dancer, when a friend told her that Nike was holding auditions in Paris. “I just showed up, and I got it,” she says with such casualness that you realize, oh yeah, when you’re as powerfully confident as Sofia Boutella, landing a Nike campaign is probably like getting a flu shot. In a bit of serendipity, the choreographer for those Nike campaigns, Jamie King, also happened to be Madonna’s frequent collaborator. So Boutella started working with Madonna, too. But to her, that—like her exploding 2017 acting career—didn’t feel like a break. “When I booked Madonna, I didn’t go, ‘Woo!’ I went, ‘Fuck. All the work is ahead.’”
Years after putting that work in—she says the best advice Madonna gave her was “If you don’t earn what you do, it will leave as fast as it came”—Boutella was eager to shape-shift again. (“We have very little time on this earth,” she tells me. “Why not explore everything you can?”) Madonna’s 2012 Super Bowl halftime show was the last of her professional dancing career. (Or dancing of virtually any kind—she hasn’t even taken a class since, and says the only time you’ll see her bust a move now is when she’s “tipsy at the club.”)
“I emailed M”—that’s what you call Madonna when you’re Boutella—“‘I don’t think I’m going to go on tour anymore.’ She knew I’d been acting. [She] said, ‘Do you have jobs? A movie?’ ‘No, I have nothing.’ ‘What if you don’t work for the next eight months?’—which is the length of the tour. I said, ‘Even if it takes two years, I know I have to do it.’”
Madonna was right to worry—two years later, after acting classes and theater roles, Boutella still hadn’t landed much of anything. She’d bought a place with money she’d made dancing, but was struggling to pay her mortgage. After making her September payment on a Monday, she had no money for October and was about to take up housekeeping. “The truth is: If you work hard enough,” she says, “you’ll be fine.” So sure enough, that following Wednesday, she booked her Kingsman audition. Thursday, she flew to London for the casting. Friday, she got the job.
Now, four years later, having starred alongside—and stolen scenes from—Samuel L. Jackson, Theron, and Cruise, she’s lined up to do it again: teaming up with Mike and Mike (B. Jordan and Shannon) in the HBO adaptation of the dystopian book Fahrenheit 451 and starring with Jeff Goldblum and Jodie Foster in sci-fi movie Hotel Artemis.
“My agent wants me to try for some lead roles,” Boutella says, her plates and margarita glass mostly empty now. And yeah, no duh. Of course she should be playing lead roles! “I say no.”
Wait, what?
“I love the experiences I’m having with amazing actors,” she says. “The more you learn, the more you realize how much more you have to learn. But I love the position I’m in right now. I’m at school. That’s how I feel in this profession: I’m in kindergarten.”
Which is both well reasoned and surprising for someone who is always launching into the next chapter. But it’s that very unpredictability that makes watching, or being around, Boutella thrilling. You see the energy bounding forward, but you’re never quite sure into what outlet. It’s why when you go to interview her at a photo shoot you end up eating corn at a hipster Cuban-Mexican joint, wondering if you’re going to have to get tequila drunk in the middle of a Saturday. Only to find out that no, she’s calling it after just one margarita, going to meet some friends. You’re left like audiences everywhere: a bit dazed, wondering what it might be like when Sofia Boutella shows up next.
A version of this story originally appeared in the December 2017 issue under the title 'The Breakouts 2017.'