Talulah Riley Fan

Finally some new Talulah news! She’s done an interview with the Sunday Express, where she talks about school days, her Pride & Prejudice obsession, filming The Liability, and sheds some light on her and Elon’s confusing off-and-on relationship…back on!

St Trinian’s Talulah Riley: ‘Boys are like puppies’

TALULAH RILEY might make a big impression on screen, but off camera she’s not one to cause a scene.

By: Lesley O’Toole

Talulah Riley is not just a pretty face

The 27 year old arrives bang on time for our 4pm appointment, wearing high nude heels, skinny cropped jeans and not a scrap of make-up. Beautiful and poised, she comes across as professional but low-key and incredibly polite. She repeatedly thanks our waiter and never once checks her watch or her phone, even when we run over our allocated finishing time. And her conversation reveals that she’s also one smart cookie.

From St Trinian’s to The Boat that Rocked, the actress may be known for films at the fluffier end of the spectrum, but there can be no doubt that British-born Talulah is seriously bright.

Surely the only actress who retweets New Scientist magazine, she has studied at the California Institute of Technology and is currently doing an Open University degree, for which she has exams next month.

Professionally, too, Talulah is turning to more serious projects. Her latest, The Liability, is a gritty revenge thriller about sex trafficking. “But the cast was very appealing,” laughs Talulah, who found the script “hilarious” in parts and loved working with fellow actors Tim Roth and Peter Mullan.

“Tim is lovely and so talented. Peter seems terrifying. He is hysterically funny and such an oddball, in the best possible way. Loads of his stuff in this film was improvised.

“Jack O’Connell is a sweetheart,” she adds, referring to her younger co-star, whose credits include Skins and This is England. “He’s such a nice guy – and a good-looking one as well. We’d go to Pizza Express in Newcastle where we filmed.”

Don’t go getting the wrong idea, because Talulah is very much a taken woman. She met her partner Elon Musk – founder of PayPal and one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs on the planet – back in 2008 at a London nightclub. The South African-born businessman was recently divorced but not for long. He and Talulah married at Skibo Castle in Scotland in September 2010, with friends, family and Silicon Valley’s elite in attendance (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was among them). Nine months later they split, but Musk tweeted his thanks for a great few years and announced he would always love Talulah.

She was reportedly awarded £2.5 million after the divorce, but no one could have predicted what happened next: a few months later, she and Elon got back together.

Talulah won’t be drawn on her relationship today (on more than one occasion she starts talking about Elon then checks herself, saying, “I’m trying not to publicly comment on anything”). But the actress is happy to confirm that she is once again with Musk, who lives in a 20,000-square-foot mansion in Bel Air, no less.

Talulah Riley is back in a relationship with Elon Musk

‘All my friends were going to university but I didn’t want another three years being institutionalised’

Being with a billionaire businessman has its fair share of perks, some of them more surreal than others. Talulah watched Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration from the front row alongside Steven Spielberg and Leonardo DiCaprio, and has taken a zero-gravity flight over California with James Cameron.It’s all a long way from Hertfordshire, where Talulah was raised by a mother who now runs a security consultancy and a father who left the police to write screenplays. An only child, she loved enid Blyton’s classic boarding-school series Mallory Towers and begged her parents to send her to a similar establishment. But after a brief, miserable spell at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, she then transferred to Haberdashers’ Aske’s, a private day school in north London. It was there that she attended an open audition for an episode of ITV’s Poirot (“I had done a lot of weekend drama classes at the Sylvia Young school”). Because she looked like a younger version of Sophie Winkleman, one of the stars, Talulah won a much bigger part than she’d gone for. Before long she found herself cast alongside Keira Knightley as Mary Bennet in the 2005 film of Pride & Prejudice.”I literally started on P&P the day after I finished my A levels,” she says. “I went to quite an academic school and all my friends were going to university, but even before my acting jobs I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to spend another three years being institutionalised, and I feel that getting out of that system benefited me in quite a few ways.”

Her creativity certainly hasn’t suffered. Talulah is currently working on her second novel (she wrote her first at 18), a chick-lit story set in LA. “It’s not biographical at all,” she says. “At least I hope it’s not, because the main character is quite a piece of work.” She has also written a screenplay, set in the illegal world of Scotland’s pearl-fishing industry, and hopes to start shooting this summer.

Ask what inspires her and it transpires she is obsessed with the BBC’s 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice, starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. She has worked with both actors since – Firth in St Trinian’s, Ehle in The Philadelphia Story at London’s Old Vic Theatre with Kevin Spacey.

“I had a stalker-like obsession for Jennifer but she was so nice to me,” smiles Talulah. “I can literally recite that series of Pride and Prejudice by heart. I watch it with my parents at least once a year. ”

These days however, Talulah has a family of her own to entertain. Elon has five sons from his first marriage – eight-year-old twins and six-year-old triplets. So what is it like having the five boys in her life?

“It’s great,” the actress beams. “Wonderful! Boys are like puppies but the thing I find terrifying is how do you steer them?”

Some years back, Talulah said that she wanted to be a mum sooner rather than later. Does she feel the same way now?

“I definitely want children,” she laughs. “And yes, I would like some girls!”

The Liability is out on May 17.