Talulah Riley is the gorgeous star of St. Trinians, out now on DVD

By Heather Christie

Some girls have all the luck. How many chicks do you know who get to start their days by riding a Vespa to class surrounded by a crew of sassy and revolutionary ladies, topped off by daily in-the-flesh interaction with Colin Firth and Rupert Everett? Oh Swoon!

But then again, Talulah Riley does indeed lead a storybook life. The 25-year-old actress is enjoying her budding success as the lead role of Annabelle Fritton in the British schoolgirl romp St. Trinian’s, just dropping now on DVD in North America. Talking with her yesterday from the set of St. Trinian’s II: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold, she admitted that she got into acting in the first place in order to lose herself in her beloved world of books.

“As a child I loved reading and used to read a lot. All my favourite books became BBC costume dramas, and I thought this is SO the way to be inside a book!”

Talulah’s love of books is understandable, given that she grew up as an only child in the rather sleepy area of Hertfordshire, England.

“Hertfordshire is the suburbs. Growing up there made me introspective, and quite a homebody,” she says, but she admits to preferring walking her dog to pumping out the emo tunes, power pop, and/or high school violence that oftentimes emerges from the ‘burbs.

Incidentally, Hertfordshire is also the location of the fictional home of the Bennetts from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Riley’s first major film role was that of Mary Bennett in the 2005 version with Keira Knightly. Six degrees, folks, six degrees. But edging away from Kevin Bacon and back to Talulah Riley, the St. Trinian’s movies perfectly fit within her dream of acting out other such favourite books.

“St. Trinian’s in the UK are an institution,” Riley states, remarking how the films began as a series of school girl novels in the 1950s about a gaggle of strong-willed, sexually precocious, and thoroughly anarchic young women.

“People probably worry about the message because it makes anarchy and disorder appealing, but it’s tempered with female friendship. I like the sort of girl power aspect, the eccentricity; it’s very English.” The St. Trinian’s sequel, Riley says, is like a cross between Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter where the girls must fight against an evil all-male organization.

Riley now splits her time between L.A. and London. While the Airmiles are a bonus and she calls both cities home, Riley remarks, “I really hate flying so it’s not the greatest for me.” It must be downright abysmal given that she’s recently lost her iPod and can’t achieve aero-zen without her steady musical diet, which includes an eclectic mix of The Cure, Blondie, Tracy Chapman, Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and Doris Day.

Lost iPods aside, Riley’s life will always be stuck on shuffle mode-but sometimes things work our. Riley admits that timing was on her side at the start of this project. She just “got really lucky,” starting her first set the day after she finished her A-levels, the British equivalent to our grade 12.

And if the shuffle churned the events out in a different way? Says the actress, “I would quite like to be a novelist or have gone to university and study philosophy…I’d be sitting in a corner somewhere talking to myself.”

Although we’re all eventually going to end up sitting in a corner talking to ourselves, we should take our cue now from Riley and the St. Trinian’s girls; between now and the looming corner-talking days we need to wreak buckets o’ havoc and never go down without a fight. If you need a guidebook to help you in this regard, watching St. Trinian’s is a good start.