25 Facts You Probably Never Knew About Hayley Atwell

British-born actress Hayley Atwell has had a unique career. She has starred in some of the most British productions imaginable — "Howards End" and "Brideshead Revisited," for example — while also making her blockbuster debut in "Captain America: The First Avenger," one of the most iconic American stories in pop culture history. When not involved with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Atwell spends much of her time doing plays in the West End. The duality of her career is in some ways reflected in her colorful upbringing, and fans of her work come from many different walks of life.

If you first became aware of Atwell in "Captain America," you're not alone. Though the film was primarily a star vehicle for Chris Evans as Steve Rogers, Atwell's turn as the unshakable Peggy Carter did not go unnoticed. Following a cameo in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" and a brief appearance in "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D," Atwell finally got her own star vehicle with the ABC series "Agent Carter," which, to the disappointment of many fans, only ran for two seasons.

Other than her continuing participation in the MCU, there's plenty more for Hayley Atwell fans to celebrate. She will star in the upcoming "Mission Impossible" film, set to come out in 2023, where we will hopefully see her bust out her action chops once more. We doubt she's done with theater, either. But what else is there to know about her? The answer is: plenty. Read on to discover some facts you never knew about Hayley Atwell.

Hayley Atwell may sound like a proper British woman, but in reality, she's only half British. Atwell was born to a British mother and an American father, reports the New York Times. Her parents met at a Dale Carnegie seminar, and they divorced when she was only two years old. From then on, Atwell spent every summer in Kansas City, Missouri, where her father and his family are from. She spent her time delighting in American traditions like catching fireflies and celebrating the Fourth of July. When in London, Atwell lived in the Notting Hill neighborhood with her mother.

While divorce is hard for most children, Atwell told The Hollywood Reporter that it felt like the right choice for her family. They always spoke kindly of one another, and she delighted in going to America every summer.

Though audiences are primarily familiar with Atwell for playing thoroughly British characters in films such as "The Duchess" and "Captain America: The First Avenger," she also had a go at playing an American character in the short-lived ABC series "Conviction." It would seem that no one is better equipped to play characters on either side of the pond than Atwell.

While casual fans of Peggy Carter may know her for being an exceedingly serious, buttoned-up intelligence officer, the behind-the-scenes antics of Agent Carter and her castmates were far more playful. While filming the series, Atwell became well-known for being the instigator of the great "Dubsmash wars" of 2015. Dubsmash, if you weren't aware, was a social media platform that allowed users to lip-sync along to songs and share them with friends. Atwell was a fan of the exercise, and challenged the cast of "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D" to a Dubsmash battle for charity, wherein users would vote for the winning team by donating a dollar to each team's charity of choice.

Things got heated, and more and more people — including Captain America himself — got involved in the battle. One of the most surprising outcomes was an unexpected cameo from a particular Muppet. Atwell enlisted the help of fellow ABC mainstay Miss Piggy to assist her in another round of Dubsmash wars. They lip-synced to Beyonce's "Single Ladies," and both Atwell and Miss Piggy — along with "Agent Carter" co-star James D'Arcy — dressed up as Agent Carter. You've really got to see it to believe it.

Though the first season of "Agent Carter" is set in New York City, the series was actually filmed in Los Angeles, where Atwell lived for a time. Because she drove herself to work every morning, Atwell needed to get an American driver's license while living there.

As she described in her Wired autocomplete interview with Ewan McGregor, the experience was a bit strange. She recalled that she needed to go to the DMV, but she only had time to do it in between scenes. "So I went dressed as Peggy Carter," she told McGregor. "And that is still my driving license photo," she said. We imagine it's not the first time that DMV employees in Hollywood had seen someone dressed in costume while getting their license, but if we had to guess, we'd wager it might have been the first time an MCU character had to take a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

To American audiences, Hayley Atwell may seem like a proper British woman, but it turns out she's just as human as the rest of us. Speaking with Jimmy Kimmel, Atwell revealed her love for reality TV after they began discussing Kim Kardashian. Atwell is a huge fan of British reality TV, proclaiming her love for the show "Gogglebox" in particular. The premise of "Gogglebox" is that ordinary people are filmed in their homes while watching and reacting to the most popular British television shows at that time. It has a huge following, and Atwell counts herself as one of the show's biggest fans, telling Kimmel that she even got starstruck when she saw one of the participants on the street one day.

Kimmel asked Atwell about "Love Island" as well, which Atwell admits she watches but hadn't caught up on since she'd been in America. Atwell described the show as being like "a drug" to her, though she added that she was rather ashamed to admit this. Although she's embarrassed about being such a fan of the genre, Atwell also had some insightful things to say about it, describing series like "Love Island" as "a form of gladiator ... there is a dark side to this." Despite her description of reality TV as an intense form of schadenfreude on the part of viewers, we think Atwell's love of the genre only makes her more endearing.

We all know that it takes a lot of preparation and hard work to become a part of the MCU, and this was no different for Hayley Atwell. Immediately after securing the part of Peggy Carter in "Captain America: The First Avenger," Atwell began her training for the role of the super-spy. As she told Jonathan Ross on his talk show, the man she trained with was actually the same man that trained Daniel Craig for "Casino Royale," a trainer by the name of Simon Waterson.

The training was no joke, says Atwell. "I turned green and threw up the first time, but then got used to it," she said at the film's premiere. Though it would take Atwell several years to get her own series in the form of "Agent Carter," her training for the first "Captain America" film proved even more useful as Peggy was thrown into the action-packed world of 1940s New York City. Atwell wanted to "have the stamina to do what will be required of me on the set with the stunts. I've made it clear very early on that I want to do as many of my own stunts as legally possible without putting my life in danger," she said in an interview at Comic-Con. We imagine her experience with action scenes and stunt work came in handy during the filming of "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One" alongside the stunt king himself, Tom Cruise.

While she spent much of her childhood in the London neighborhood of Notting Hill, Hayley Atwell spent many summers as a child in Kansas City, where her father and his family are from. As a result of this familial connection, Atwell got to participate in one of the greatest American honors our country has to offer: throwing the first pitch at a baseball game.

Speaking with co-star Ewan McGregor in an interview for Wired, Atwell revealed that she took part in this auspicious event for the Kansas City Royals. She even pitched a strike, though she added that it "wasn't a powerful strike." In response, McGregor said he was asked to throw the first pitch once but was too afraid to do it for fear that he would get booed by the crowd. The indomitable Peggy Carter would never turn down an opportunity like that, so we're not surprised Atwell jumped at the chance to try something new. (No shade to McGregor, of course.)

While Hayley Atwell may be best known for her action prowess and her classy work in period pieces, she's also dabbled in radio as well. Speaking with Craig Ferguson, she revealed that she had voiced a character in a few episodes of a "Doctor Who" radio play. The character was known as the "President of the Universe," Atwell said, and she happened to be bald, though this didn't affect Atwell's performance much. This is not the first time Atwell has done voice acting — she also narrated a spy podcast called Spyscape, will voice Lara Croft in an upcoming Netflix anime series, and of course, voiced Peggy Carter herself in The Disney+ series "What If...?"

Not surprisingly, Atwell's work on the radio show led some to wonder whether she might want a role on the television series. In 2015, Atwell gave fans something to talk about when she responded to a Twitter question about her interest in being on the show by saying "I'd like to BE Doctor Who." Atwell later reneged on her claim that she would like to play the Doctor. "I don't want to play it. No. It's just not my thing, but I really respect it," she said at a convention in 2017.

Of course, the role of the first female Doctor went to Jodie Whittaker, but we imagine Atwell was pleased with this casting decision: She and Whittaker attended drama school together at Guildhall School in London and are good friends.

Atwell may not seem like the tattoo type — since she wasn't one of the Avengers, she didn't get a famous Avengers tattoo along with the rest of the team — but you'd be wrong to assume she's completely inkless. She told the Evening Standard, "I have a fleur de lys on my wrist that I got in New Orleans; the meaning is a secret."

When Craig Ferguson pointed out the tattoo on his show, Atwell was playfully chagrined. "My dad's backstage and he didn't really know until you mentioned it — sorry Dad," she joked. We're not sure how her dad missed that one, but Atwell's tattoo is certainly easier to cover up on screen than the ink of other heavily-tattooed stars like, say, Angelina Jolie. If Atwell ever decides to get any more tattoos, we imagine she won't tell us (or her dad).

There's no question that Chris Evans, who played the title role and Hayley Atwell's love interest in "Captain America: The First Avenger," is extremely famous now. But while Evans was reasonably well-known prior to playing Captain America — he had previously dabbled in the superhero genre with 2005's "Fantastic Four" — Atwell was not aware of him at all before they met.

You might assume that Atwell would have known what she was signing up for when she got cast in "Captain America," but she says that was not the case. She told the Hollywood Reporter that she was auditioning for many different projects during that period and that she was "kind of ignorant about it at the time." As she put it, "'Captain America' for me at the time was another audition as a working actor."

Atwell wasn't familiar with the material nor the leading actor during the audition process. "I hadn't read comic books, and Chris Evans, for me, was a ginger-haired DJ in the UK who presented a show called 'Don't Forget Your Toothbrush' Saturday night when I was a kid." In retrospect, Atwell said that her ignorance about what she was walking into was actually beneficial, because it meant she didn't put too much pressure on herself. Unfortunately for the British Chris Evans, he is no longer the most famous man with that name, but we hope he doesn't blame Captain America for that.

If you're familiar with the world of theater, you know that things can get pretty weird sometimes. Gender-bending, actors playing animals, even onstage nudity — these are things you might encounter in the wonderful world of the stage. Hayley Atwell, who attended drama school and started out doing theater, is no stranger to the dramaturgic way of life.

Atwell's first role after drama school was in "Prometheus Bound," which she landed just two weeks after graduating, reports the New York Times. She played the maiden Io, who is cursed by Zeus and destined to live forever as a cow. The man who played Prometheus and her good friend, the actor David Oyelowo, only had laudatory things to say about Atwell.

"We weren't about to put Hayley into a cow suit," Oyelowo said. "She did the most incredible physical work whereby you completely believed she was both a woman and a cow. I was awestruck. She did it so simply. She would ball her hands into fists and make them look like hooves. It was so tender, and she looked so fragile." Sadly, it's likely that none of us will ever be able to witness Atwell playing a cow again, so we'll just have to be content with imagining it in our heads.

Hayley Atwell was a fairly strong student during her adolescence, and her studiousness led to her being accepted to Oxford on the condition that she kept her grades up for the rest of the school year. Atwell didn't end up going to Oxford, however, because she didn't do well on her final exams.

"I think I kind of sabotaged it, to be honest," she told The Independent. "I remember after it all happened and it was clear I wasn't going to go to Oxford I felt liberated." Atwell already knew that she wanted to be an actor at this point, and her rejection from Oxford allowed her to pursue the career that she truly wanted. After high school, she went on to attend the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where her classmates included Jodie Whittaker from "Doctor Who" and Michelle Dockery of "Downton Abbey" fame. We're pretty confident she made the right choice, after all.

Atwell's mother is a motivational speaker by trade, which led to some interesting experiences for Atwell growing up. Atwell's parents met at a seminar for Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" book, and as a child Atwell would sometimes travel with her mother for work. When she was nine years old, she walked across hot coals for a "personal empowerment ceremony," reported the Evening Standard.

Atwell's father is now a massage therapist and an occasional shaman, and Atwell says her bohemian upbringing certainly made her stand out from other kids. "I had that Sacred Spirit album [Native American chants and dances]. When everyone else was listening to garage, I was listening to that and Enya," she told the Evening Standard. She even read Carl Jung and René Descartes as a child, something that we imagine might have influenced the intellectual way she approaches acting as an adult.

Considering her self-appointed status as the queen of Dubsmash, one might assume that Hayley Atwell would be pretty comfortable with the idea of lip-syncing. You wouldn't be wrong to make this assumption, but according to Atwell, she might be a little too comfortable with the idea of lip-syncing in front of an international audience. When The Guardian asked Atwell what her most embarrassing moment was, she told them it was her performance on Lip Sync Battle, because, as she puts it, "I overcommitted. My face is way too animated and rubbery."

Continuing the great Dubsmash wars of 2015, Atwell battled with "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." star Clark Gregg on the show. Gregg performed a rendition of Britney Spears' "Toxic" — replete with a full flight attendant theme and choreography — while Atwell performed Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance." Gregg may have had an advantage because he got his then-wife, "Dirty Dancing" actress Jennifer Grey, to lock lips with him on stage in a special cameo appearance.

We've got to give it to Atwell though, because she also went all-out with her performance, emerging out of a white pod dressed in a jaw-dropping black spandex getup reminiscent of Gaga's own look in the music video. Plus we disagree with Atwell's own criticism that she "overcommitted" to the bit — that's really not possible on "Lip Sync Battle," as far as we're concerned.

Emma Thompson is famously the kind of person who doesn't put up with rude behavior from anyone, and Hayley Atwell has learned this firsthand. Atwell and Thompson worked together on the 2008 film "Brideshead Revisited," which is set in the 1920s. Atwell told the Evening Standard that a producer on the film suggested that she lose weight, and she thought "OK, I suppose I should," until Thompson intervened. Thompson told her, "You're not a model. You're an actor," which convinced her to ignore the producer's advice.

Thompson reflected on the incident herself on a Swedish talk show in 2017. "The producer said to her, 'Will you lose some weight?'" she recalled. "And I said to them, 'If you speak to her about this again on any level, I will leave this picture. You are never to do that.'" She went on to say, "It's evil what's happening there, and it's getting worse."

At one point it was reported that Harvey Weinstein was the producer who said this to Atwell, but Atwell says this is not the case. "It was put to me in a delicate way, very discreetly, very subtly — by someone not related in any way to Harvey Weinstein," she told the BBC. Atwell said she has never received any comments about her weight apart from that one incident, and was disheartened to hear she was being discussed in relation to Weinstein in any way.

One of the (many) things fans love about Hayley Atwell's performance as Peggy Carter in "Captain America: The First Avenger" is her relatable reaction to seeing Steve Rogers as Captain America for the first time. After Dr. Erskine (Stanley Tucci) puts Steve in the pod, he emerges moments later with his, shall we say, greatly improved physique. Peggy is one of the many people to rush towards Steve in the aftermath of his transformation, and as she does so, she reaches out to touch his "man boob," as Atwell frequently describes it.

Obviously, this is the perfect reaction to seeing Captain America in the flesh for the first time, so we were surprised to find the specifics of Atwell's performance here weren't scripted. As Atwell revealed in Esquire, "When Chris Evans first took his shirt off on the set of 'Captain America,' I just instinctively grabbed his man boob. They kept it in the film. So we did a couple of takes of me being really inappropriate with my hand on his pec for the duration of the scene." All we can do is thank Atwell for her dedication to the craft and her service to the American people in this important scene.

Atwell was destined to become an actress, it seems. On The Hollywood Reporter's Awards Chatter podcast, Atwell revealed that the origin of her name relates to her chosen profession. She said that she was named after the British actress Hayley Mills, the daughter of actor Sir John Mills. Hayley Mills is most famous for her work as a child actor, when she starred in films such as "Pollyanna" and "The Parent Trap," and has continued her career on stage. Atwell described how her mother was a big fan of Mills, and though her parents weren't actors themselves, they took her to the theater frequently.

She was immediately captured by the magic of the theater, and recalled how "thrilling and exciting" she found it to be as a child. She thought being an actor seemed like an incredible profession because "they didn't have to grow up" and were just "constantly playing." Atwell was acting in school plays by the time she was a teenager, so it's safe to say her namesake and the magical world of the theater had a significant impact on her life.

Hayley Atwell is clearly an intelligent woman, and it seems her dedication to learning never stops, even when she's on a huge film set. The Evening Standard reported that while filming "Captain America: The First Avenger," Atwell took a "three-month Open University course in art history, haiku poetry, and Burma." Atwell says that was during a period when she was "taking herself a lot more seriously" but that she's "lightened up since then."

Of course, there have also been projects where Atwell hasn't had time to take an entire university course during shooting. Atwell clearly had some downtime while filming "Captain America" because she wasn't in every scene, but that certainly wasn't the case for her eponymous series, "Agent Carter." As Atwell put it in an interview for the series, it was quite the adjustment starring in "Agent Carter" because she was front and center in practically every scene in the show. "You're driving every scene, so it takes a certain amount of stamina," she said, conceding that there was definitely no time to dabble in school during that shoot.

Though Hayley Atwell's grades were good enough for her to receive a conditional offer to attend Oxford University, that offer was rescinded when she didn't do well on her final exams. For Atwell, this was a good thing, as what she really wanted to do was act. Instead of going to Oxford, she decided to attend the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

The school wasn't free, of course, and Atwell cut her teeth as a young actor in order to afford her tuition. While learning various forms of serious acting techniques at school and working for a casting director on the side, Atwell got the chance to audition for a commercial. That commercial happened to be one for Pringles, and as Atwell told the Hollywood Reporter, it actually helped her pay for drama school. While her first few roles after drama school were quite serious and weighty, Atwell joked that it was the Pringles commercial that "enabled [her] to pay for the Shakespeare."

While Hayley Atwell may seem like the picture of elegance and grace now, her peers certainly didn't see her that way when she was in school. She told The Guardian that she was called "Hayley Fatwell" at school, adding, "My real self, the self I have always been from a child, is a loner and nerd, slightly overweight, with a very heavy fringe." She finds it jarring to see pictures of herself as an adult, she said, because that's just not how she sees herself.

As often happens when one becomes a public figure, certain people from Atwell's past have reached out. She recalls that one girl who used to torment her on a daily basis came out of the woodwork unexpectedly. "She tried to Facebook me a year ago. I ignored her. 'Are you kidding me? You made my life hell,'" she told the Evening Standard. The daughter of a motivational speaker and a shaman, Atwell tried to address the situation with maturity, but it was difficult. Luckily, Atwell says, both her parents encouraged her to be herself and speak her mind, and she was able to emerge victorious from a rather difficult schooling experience.

Stars often discuss the jobs they had while working as struggling actors — waiting tables, for example — but Atwell had one job as a young person that gave her a lot of insight into the industry. Prior to attending drama school, Atwell worked for a time as an assistant to a casting director. She told The Hollywood Reporter that it was an incredibly useful and illuminating experience for her.

Atwell's job was to be there at the audition and read with the actors auditioning for the part. Atwell said that what would often happen was someone would audition, she would be blown away by their performance and assume that they would get the part, only for the casting director or the director to turn them away for seemingly arbitrary reasons. The director would concede that the actor was indeed very good, but decided that they were too short, or that they wanted someone blonde, or any number of other reasons.

Atwell says this taught her an important lesson about auditioning, one that would stay with her for the rest of her career. "What was helpful to me, later on," she said, "was to start to try and develop the ability to not take things personally, not to see it as a personal rejection, that I just concentrated on doing the best I could at an audition, and left knowing I had done that. Then it was out of my hands what the result would be."

You get the sense from reading interviews with Atwell that she's a pretty big fan of cinema and of acting in general, so it's not surprising that she would want to share her love of the craft with a wider audience. Atwell was given the chance to do just that through her collaboration with The Picture House, a film center based in Westchester County, New York. Atwell leads a film class series called Hayley Atwell Selects, where she discusses some of her favorite films with contemporary actors and thinkers.

The films she has selected for the class include "Portrait of a Lady on Fire," "A Fantastic Woman," "Eve's Bayou," and "Home." As the Picture House website describes it, "Hayley brings her in-depth knowledge of film — and a slate of exciting guests, all with unique perspectives on film and the industry — to TPH members for fascinating discussions."

The classes are available for anyone around the world to attend and are held over Zoom. It seems that we can now add "film professor" to Atwell's already extensive resume.

While her role as Peggy Carter is certainly her most-watched performance, others might know her from her brilliant turn in an episode of the anthology series "Black Mirror." The series, which initially aired in the UK on Channel 4, was moved to Netflix in 2015, where it became extremely popular with American audiences as well.

Atwell starred in a Season 2 episode called "Be Right Back," playing a woman named Martha who is dealing with the recent loss of her boyfriend. She learns about a service that can recreate an AI version of your loved ones by compiling all of their social media posts, and she decides to give the service a try, with heart-wrenching results.

Atwell had to pitch herself as a potential player in the series. As she told the Hollywood Reporter, she reached out to the "Black Mirror" producers and asked, "Please, would you consider giving me a part in it, I don't care what it is." They obviously said yes, but what Atwell found interesting is that they told her they never would have considered her for the part had she not reached out — perhaps because, as THR's Scott Feinberg suggested, she had primarily done period pieces up to that point. Atwell noted that it wasn't a conscious decision to work mostly in period pieces, but that she was glad she took the initiative to do something a little bit different.

Though her roles on "Black Mirror" and the ABC series "Conviction" may have convinced the powers-that-be that Hayley Atwell does perfectly well in contemporary projects, Atwell found herself once again in a period piece with the 2018 film "Christopher Robin." The film stars Ewan McGregor as the grown-up Christopher Robin, who learns from a few old friends how to enjoy life once again. Atwell plays Christopher's wife, Evelyn.

Making a live-action version of the beloved Winnie the Pooh story may seem like an almost sacrilegious undertaking, but Atwell found both the process and the final product incredibly heartwarming. She told Good Morning America that many of the scenes with Pooh and his friends were shot using adorable stuffed animals, making shooting the film a fairly unique experience.

Despite the fact that she knew the story very well, Atwell got emotional while watching the final cut. "I know this, I read the script, I filmed it, and yet when I watched it for the first time last week, by myself ... I was crying through the opening credits, because without being too sentimental it's just very innocent, it's very sweet," she said.

When actors become involved in projects that develop a dedicated, passionate fan base, things can go one of two ways. The actor can be gracious and open to hearing fans' ideas, or they can look the other way. With her role as Peggy Carter in her standalone series, Atwell most certainly chose the former route, to the delight of her fans.

Though it was likely not intended to be interpreted this way, at least initially, some fans of "Agent Carter" quickly latched on to the relationship between Peggy and her friend Angie Martinelli (Lyndsy Fonseca), sensing romantic undertones between the two women. The couple was christened "Cartinelli," and a whole new group of fans of the series emerged.

Atwell became aware that some fans wanted the two women to get together — both because of discussions on social media and through questions she received at various conventions — and she was nothing but supportive of the idea, as was Fonseca. When one fan asked Atwell a question about the possibility of Cartinelli at the London Film and Comic Con, Atwell responded, "I would love it to be and so would Lyndsy. We are absolutely, 100 percent, up for that." 

As a result of her role as Peggy Carter, Atwell has gained a legion of passionate fans, many of whom are young women who look up to Peggy. Atwell has interacted with a number of these fans online and at conventions, but one fan affected her life more than any other. Speaking on the Hollywood Reporter podcast, Atwell shared the story of Georgina Callander.

Callander was an 18-year-old girl who was part of a community of young women from around the who were fans of Peggy, and who congregated on social media and at conventions, bonding over their love of the character. Atwell got the chance to meet Callander at a convention in Blackpool, where she had traveled with a group of fans who called themselves the "Crazy Dotties" after a character on the show.

Callander was tragically killed at the Manchester bombing in 2017. Atwell recalls that she found out about it because Callander's friends all messaged her on social media with the news. "I just felt like my life took a different kind of focus at that point," she said. All her friends from the fan group came together for the funeral, and Atwell continued communicating with them. She said that experiences with fans like Callander "give meaning" to her work: "I didn't feel like it's about me, it's their connection to each other through what they relate to in this character and my portrayal of her."