If Showtime's returning miniseries The Tudors occasionally strays from strict historical fact toward a bit of wanton violence and bodice-ripping, it doesn't mean that 26-year-old Natalie Dormer can't hold her own on the intricacies of court power struggles and the religious and political upheavals of Reformation Europe. "I was a dreadful swot at school, very geeky," she confesses, "and the head girl." Dormer admits to having been "horribly bullied" as if it were thoroughly deserved. Three years of training at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London changed her. "I was very repressed," she says, "but they break your character down to reconstruct you." Well, they didn't do a bad job.
The experience might have helped Dormer loosen up, but it is her underlying intelligence as much as her alluring, feline-eyed, sensual-mouthed, sharp-cheekboned beauty that makes her compelling as the doomed Anne Boleyn. "It was the perfect part for me," she says between mouthfuls of smoked salmon and gulps of a gin and tonic at the Wolseley. "Early on in the first series, I was very green, but my role, my power, and my confidence grew along with Anne Boleyn's. We came of age at the same time." Dormer's only previous major movie credit was a cameo with the late Heath Ledger in Lasse Hallström's Casanova, which had to be expanded after she surprised herself, and the director, with "an unexpected gift for burlesque." Dormer claims not to mind getting typecast in corsets, but hankers for some role where she can "run around in jeans and a T-shirt with a gun in my hand." Fencing is her sport, though, which doesn't much help her cause.
Understandably, Dormer's wary of spilling the beans on her charismatic Irish costar, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, even though he's earning a reputation as Europe's answer to Robert Downey Jr. "The truth is," she says diplomatically, "he is very focused, very committed to his work, and he was very generous with me." Likely aware of their smoldering screen chemistry, Dormer explains — horrified at the idea — why she wouldn't date an actor, how there's only room for one overwrought emotionalist, and how she always goes for "solid-rock types." Currently she's dating someone sturdy who "works on the other side of the camera."
After dinner, she's rushing off to her hometown (Reading in Berkshire) to play in a poker tournament with old classmates — "eight boys and me" — and it comes as little surprise to discover that she won the overall prize last year; she's on some kind of a roll. "When I won, I told them that it was payback for having seen my breasts on TV," Dormer says, knowing well that dynasties have tumbled for such a trade.
