Alice Englert - Harper's BAZAAR

While it’s true Alice Englert comes from filmmaking royalty (her mother is Jane Campion), with a new series on Stan and her directorial feature film debut imminent, it’s clear she has forged a path all of her own

For a brief moment while she was shooting her directorial feature film debut, Bad Behaviour, Alice Englert wondered whether she could start a cult. The film, which was shot on New Zealand’s South Island, stars Jennifer Connelly as a badly behaved woman on a spiritual retreat and Ben Whishaw as the charismatic spiritual leader. “He was so incredible, at one point I thought, I wonder if we could just spend the rest of the budget on setting up a cult, and maybe Netflix would do a documentary on us,” she says, laughing.

If Englert starts a cult, sign me up. While we talk over Zoom — me at my kitchen table in Sydney, she on her hotel bed in New York — she is supremely chill, quick to laugh, and charming in a way no cult leaders really are: that is to say, genuinely. Though, as she has also proven, she can deploy her wiles when they’re called for.

Simultaneous to working on Bad Behaviour — which also she wrote and starred in as Connelly’s daredevil stunt performer daughter — she stars in the new series Dangerous Liaisons, an adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 18th-century novel Les Liaisons dangereuses. The series tells the origin story of the Marquise de Merteuil (Englert) and the Vicomte de Valmont (Nicholas Denton), who began as young lovers on the eve of the French Revolution and climbed their way out of the slums of Paris to the French aristocracy. As a woman living in the 18th century, Merteuil must utilise every deceitful tactic she has to navigate a world of sex, class, power, love, sexism, oppression and a country on the brink of collapse in a time that was incredibly dangerous for a woman of conviction. She must seduce and manipulate everyone she comes into contact with — including Valmont — in order to survive.

“I feel lucky to play a character like her, who has been so many different people,” Englert says, referencing the actors who have played Merteuil in the Dangerous Liaisons cannon, including Glenn Close in the 1988 film, and Sarah Michelle Geller in 1999’s Cruel Intentions, which brought the story into a modern day high school.

“[Merteuil and Valmont’s] story is driven by their haunting history,” she continues. “You think it’s going to be a love story, but it’s actually two people falling for each other in another way: instead of falling in love, they fall into bondage with each other. They’re the best they have for each other in that time. Sometimes we’re so hungry for love, and —” she laughs again — “we have to eat, you know?

“It was so dangerous for a woman in that time to show any vulnerability at all. It was a time when you’re just dead at 28, after having, like, 12 children,” she continues. “I love her ability to be so completely ruthless in her desire to go beyond what has been given to her. She’s trying to win in a game that’s completely set up for her to lose.”

To go from the restrictive corsetry of pre-Revolution Paris to the safety harness of a stunt performer is quite the (literal) leap, but being deft at changing lanes is a skill Englert has been honing since birth. She was born in 1994, the same year her mother, New Zealand director Jane Campion, won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for The Piano, which she wrote, directed and produced. Her father, Colin Englert, is an Australian filmmaker, and her maternal grandmother was an actor and her grandfather a theatre director. 

All this to say that from the very beginning, all Englert knew was the nomadic life of a creative. She would follow her parents from set to set, play with actors between takes, and be given a biscuit and asked to leave the editing room while they were cutting sex scenes. Her parents separated when she was seven, and she went to schools in Australia, New Zealand, New York City, Rome and London, and boarding school in England in a self-determined quest to become more independent. 

Englert eventually left high school to pursue acting. “There was always something about it that made sense to me,” she explains. “It made more sense to me than the pretending people do in normal life. In films, you’re allowed to be fucked up, you’re allowed to be bizarre and weird and sad. But in normal life, there’s pressure to be good and cool and happy and fine. Working in stories felt like a loophole, like a strange trapdoor into being able to actually talk about real things. I could see from a young age that was where my mum felt most articulate as well; that was where she was allowed to be herself. She really met me when she started to notice that I could hear what she was hearing.” 

Englert made her first on-screen appearance in her mother’s short The Water Diary in 2006 when she was 12. Since 2012, she has gathered impressive acting credits in quick succession, including that year’s Ginger & Rosa with Elle Fanning, Beautiful Creatures (2013) with Viola Davis and Emma Thompson, Top of the Lake (2017) with Nicole Kidman, Them That Follow (2019) with Olivia Colman, and Ratched (2020) with Sarah Paulson. She’s also directed two short films: 2017’s Family Matters, starring Whishaw, and 2015’s The Boyfriend Game with fellow New Zealander on the rise Thomasin McKenzie. 

The difference with Bad Behaviour is that not only is it Englert’s first feature film, but she’s also starring in it while directing, an endeavour that requires staying in character while also taking mental notes about the scene. “It’s odd. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to do it,” she says, laughing. “It’s like being hypermobile. Sometimes you can just make your brain not engage [in a certain way] because you can sense that your gut really wants to do something. I’m quite instinctual and so I surrounded myself with people I trust and whose faces I can read and who wanted to make the same film as me.”

She takes a moment to reflect on where she’s been and where she’s going. “There’s so much that has been beautiful and bizarre,” she muses. “That’s part of why I want to play these characters in these strange worlds, struggling to find something to hold onto. I just want everyone to get what they want.”

This article originally appeared in the December 2022 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR. Photographed by Stephanie Diani; styled by Sarah Slutsky Tooley