When ’s newly hired LA publicist emails to change the location of our interview from a smart restaurant in Chelsea to a sad-sack Cineworld on the Fulham Road, I think there must be some mistake. A down-at-heel, sticky-carpeted multiplex with a lingering smell of popcorn? It doesn’t feel like a venue for an inaugural Vogue interview with one of the new Charlie’s Angels triumvirate. But this neighbourhood cinema in south-west London has particular significance for Balinska. Growing up with her mother – model and chef Lorraine Pascale – around the corner in Battersea, it was the backdrop to her childhood and adolescence, where she would sneak into films with 15 certificates: “I remember watching the movie, so anxious the police were going to come and get me.” It was the place where she was “the small kid with big dreams”.
© Craig McDean
As debuts go, starring alongside Kristen Stewart and Naomi Scott in Elizabeth Banks’s reboot of the iconic Charlie’s Angels franchise is pretty good going. Balinska plays machine gun-toting, ex-MI6 Jane Kano, in a feminist-friendly update that sees the Townsend Agency upgraded to a global intelligence service. It’s quite an upgrade for Balinska, too: last year she was topping up her acting work (namely, a part in Sky teen drama The Athena and a turn in Casualty) with shifts on the floor of Selfridges’ shoe department.
© Craig McDean
But it was always about acting. Her aspirations started young, her confidence growing with each lead role she bagged in school plays. By sixth form, after a stint in the National Youth Theatre, Balinska knew it was her vocation, and she was soon accepted into the Guildford School of Acting. That’s when things got “real-real”.