She’s the British actress who urged Elon Musk to buy Twitter. Now she’s an advocate for mathematical sciences. Not so unlikely - she’s always been a geek. Times science editor Tom Whipple meets her.
This is not actually, explains Talulah Riley, the first time she has posed in front of a blackboard. There was another occasion.
In the common room of the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences (Lims), a suitably mathsy blackboard awaits her photoshoot. Scrawled in chalk there is some group theory, some matrix maths and a bit of quantum mechanics. Riley is interested in number theory, so there was a suggestion of adding Fermat’s little theorem, especially for the pictures. The suggestion was rejected on the grounds the equation is too trivial. No number theorist would actually bother writing it down.
It is not quite as trivial, though, as what was on her last blackboard, 17 years ago. On that occasion, Riley stood, chalk in hand, finger coquettishly in mouth, wearing a black dress and a come-hither expression. On the blackboard, she was writing lines: “I must wear school uniform”.
It was a shoot for her 2007 film St Trinian’s, in which minxy schoolgirls do minxy things while dressed in the sort of minxy, suspenders-heavy clothing that makes 2007 seem like a different country.
Posing in a little black dress for a promotional shoot was not, she says now, how her parents saw her life going. “I was supposed to be the first person in my family to go to university. It was a bit of a sore spot with my mother that I didn’t because I started working instead.”
A lot has changed since then, and not just sexual politics. Riley, 38, has appeared in Inception, Westworld and, most recently, as Vivienne Westwood in the Sex Pistols biopic Pistol. She has sat in for a year of maths and physics lectures at Caltech, Pasadena and, since returning from California, resumed working towards a mathematics and physics degree at the Open University. Her mum might yet be proud. She has published two novels. And she has had three weddings.
The latest, this summer, was to Thomas Brodie-Sangster, 34, Malcolm McLaren in Pistol, but perhaps best known for playing Jojen Reed in Game of Thrones. The other two were, notably, to the same person. Even more notably, that person, whom she first married in 2010 and first divorced in 2012, was Elon Musk.
Which wedding was best, I ask. “Um, I don’t know how fair it is to rank weddings. All my weddings have been very lovely.” Like children? “Yeah, they’re different, but equally loveable.” One way in which they weren’t different is that Musk was at all three — just, in the latter one, having flown in by private jet, in the unaccustomed position of not being the groom. They are still very much friends.
Musk is how she, having been always interested in science, found herself in her early 20s meeting her scientific heroes. “People whom just a few years previously I’d been studying and admiring I was having private lunches with. Kip Thorne [the theoretical physicist], Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Max Tegmark [the cosmologist], you know — blah blah blah blah.” The “blahs”, I am given to understand, stand in for all the other grandees-who-lunched. “It was the environment I kind of grew up in, to an extent.”
So, being associated with the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, an elite independent research unit for maths and theoretical physics that currently exists on the second floor of the Royal Institution, isn’t so odd. She is on their board in part to raise funds for three junior research fellowships in the memory of Tom Tombrello, a Caltech physics professor who more than a decade ago let her sit in on his lectures. Although, as the photoshoot is prepared, and as we sit in a small room — also with maths-strewn blackboard — that is not what we are talking about. We are, instead, talking about bees.
She lives with Brodie-Sangster in Hertfordshire, and they have a smallholding. “There are sheep, ducks, ponies,” she says. There are chickens and a cockerel called Keith. (“Keith has a great life. He looks like a T. rex when he runs.”) They have just got some geese. And then came the bees. They bought the hive, found the site, sent Ellie, the woman who helps them out in the house, on a beekeeping course, and then the plan had been to order some on the internet. The day before the wedding, the bees had other plans. “The caterer came to me somewhat flustered and said, ‘There’s a huge swarm of bees right where we want to have the champagne reception. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. Please come quickly.’
“So I went to the back garden and there was a huge black cloud. Biblical plague proportions.” She asked Ellie, fresh from her course, for thoughts. “She said, ‘This is slightly above my pay grade.’ " So, the night before the wedding, Ellie’s beekeeping teacher came over and together they got the bees into the hive.
‘Elon said, “Would you like to come to my hotel room to look at rocket videos?” And he did just show me rocket videos’
It felt, says Riley, like an omen. Luckily, Ellie’s bee teacher said it was a good one. “Historically in a family, people go and speak to the bees and tell them about births, marriages and deaths. Apparently, when the Queen died they went to tell the royal bees. And so the night before the wedding, we went to the bees to say, ‘Welcome. We’re getting married tomorrow, just for your information.’ Anyway, they’re still with us.”
After the ceremony, they left out the flowers and watched as the bees pollinated them. Later, when the bee season is over, Ellie will put on her beekeeping suit, get out her smoke machine, and “we will get wedding honey”.
Riley has eclectic interests. She enjoys carriage racing — like the late Duke of Edinburgh — and campanology. She does bell-ringing at the local church. So it should not be so odd that among those interests are maths and theoretical physics. Nor should it be odd that this interest preceded Musk. In fact, Riley can trace it precisely. In sixth form, she read about a classic demonstration of quantum mechanics, known as the double-slit experiment, in which light can appear to behave as both a wave and a particle at the same time.
“I must have been about 17. And I read it and just burst into tears. It completely shifted my understanding of reality. It’s so amazing that I can’t believe it’s not all everyone is talking about all day, every day. It frightened me. I went to bed for three days and had a massive existential crisis.”
Riley seems, in the nicest way, a little odd. She doesn’t drink and never really has — she just decided she didn’t like it. She went to Cheltenham Ladies College because she had read Malory Towers (“I begged to go to boarding school because I’m an only child and thought it would be really good fun”) and then, when she realised that Enid Blyton was a bad way to choose a school (“In a week I was begging to come home”), to Haberdashers’ Aske’s in North London. She didn’t go to university but, despite being successful in acting, started studying for a degree anyway.
She is also odd in that, despite that success, despite having appeared in several Hollywood films, she doesn’t seem that fussed about doing so again. Later over a drink (sparkling water for her) in the Lims common room, she will talk, unbothered, about how she expects all non-theatre acting to be replaced by AI. She is not, she says, looking for acting jobs. She is, in fact, planning on taking six months to head off to Australia to accompany Brodie-Sangster on his next shoot (“I think his career is the notable and exciting one”).
There, she will write her next novel. It’s about a woman who wins a house on Instagram. Her preferred third novel was rejected, she says, on the grounds of being a little too dystopian. It was about a woman who meets a tech CEO who is making hyper-realistic sex bots. “They have this crazy connection. And he says, would she consider giving her personality as the foundation personality for these models?” Interestingly, her first novel, Acts of Love, involved a romance with a tech billionaire who sees through the heroine’s carapace to the real woman beyond. Any similarity to visionary — occasionally veering on dystopian — tech CEOs with whom Riley can imagine strong women making strong connections is, of course, coincidental.
In a BBC documentary about Musk, she tells a sweet story of how they met, in a bar in London. “Elon said, ‘Would you like to come to my hotel room to look at rocket videos?’ And we did go to his hotel room and he did just show me rocket videos.”
She was 22. She has a thought, now, recalling their meeting. “When we met I think he was probably my age now.”
They are still in touch and she is still in contact with his children. Court documents revealed during Musk’s legal battle with Twitter show that she urged him to buy the platform.
“I honestly think social media is the scourge of modern life, and the worst of all is Twitter,” she wrote in messages to him. “But it’s very easy to exploit and is being used by radicals for social engineering on a massive scale. And this s*** is infecting the world. Please do something to fight woke-ism.”
Is she responsible for the purchase?
“I can’t speak to that, actually.” Although, she does say, she influenced one of his (so far) less successful companies — created in 2018 with the plan of building transport and freight tunnels. “I’m the reason the Boring Company is named the Boring Company. He wanted to call it Tunnels ‘R’ Us. That was one of our more heated exchanges.”
When Riley talks about Musk — a man she got on with well enough to marry twice and, admittedly, also got on with badly enough to divorce twice — she is only ever complimentary. Why, I ask, is there such a disconnect between her understanding of him and that of us wet European liberals?
“Well,” she says, “you know more than anyone how what we read in the mainstream media is not necessarily an absolute truth.” She has an analogy, a word from wrestling that refers to a staged performance in which people conspire to believe. “It’s ‘kayfabe’ — everyone’s telling a story to a certain extent and will frame things to a certain extent.” So we aren’t seeing the real Musk? “I loved/love the guy, so I’m incredibly subjective in my opinion, cannot be unbiased and shouldn’t be expected to be either. I’m sure, well… You know what being in love is, right?”
It is a Friday afternoon and, on the other side of the door, Lims is preparing for its evening drinks. Over beers and wine the physicists and mathematicians will mark the end of the week. They will put down their pencils, leave behind their professional maths and come together over other things. Like recreational maths.
They do so these days, sometimes, in an ever so slightly more gender-balanced environment. Among the mathematicians abandoning the blackboards of their offices to gather in front of the blackboard of the common room, there is a little bit of stardust alongside the chalk dust, in the form of Riley’s circle of friends.
Lims was founded in 2011 and modelled a little on the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where Einstein spent his dotage. Academics can come here — including, recently, several on a joint scholarship for Ukrainians and Russians — and study in what is, for academia, luxury. The couple of dozen given fellowships don’t have to publish any work or teach. Their life isn’t dominated by grant applications and research metrics. They have a big Smeg fridge with beer and a sofa.
Lims wanted Riley on its board because … Well, if you were a mathematician and you found out Talulah Riley was into maths, wouldn’t you put her on your board? Part of her role, as she sees it, is “bringing Lims to a wider audience … So I’ve brought actors and directors to the Friday night symposiums. And it’s really fun, because you get a mix of people who wouldn’t usually interact with one another. And everyone has a good time.”
It can feel, initially, quite incongruous. At a talk two months earlier, Riley wasn’t there, but one of her friends was. In the drinks afterwards, the actress Natascha McElhone could be spotted. She strode amid the mathematicians like a dazzling, ethereal giraffe.
Our interview hasn’t been especially easy. It takes a while for Riley to warm up. She seems to like talking about the bees and Keith the cockerel, but less about other things. For the first 20 minutes of our allotted hour, she looks anywhere but at me. I get the sense that she wants to help the mathematicians by doing the interview but equally, understandably, doesn’t especially want to be that forthcoming about herself. When it ends, I apologise for the social awkwardness.
But then a gong strikes, to mark the start of their Friday mathematical social, and that changes. Outside, over drinks, it is easier. We talk about Christianity (she has become an Anglican), cockerels and whether or not she would kill a chicken (possibly, but not a sheep). It feels, despite being only on sparkling water, that she is settling in for the evening.
She introduces me to Raiyah, one of her friends, who isn’t a mathematician but equally is clearly perfectly capable of holding her own in this environment. She isn’t an actor or director though. Riley tells me her friend is from Jordan and has an academic background in Japanese literature.
As it happens we share an interest in Jordan — I have visited — and I tell her all about the tourist sites I saw. It turns out she has seen them too. I probably, I later fear, mansplain Jordanian heritage for a while. Only in writing this piece and trying to work out how to spell her name did I realise she was “from Jordan” in the sense Prince William is “from Wales”. She is the daughter of King Hussein of Jordan and is indeed probably moderately familiar with the country’s castles.
When I leave, the scientists are only getting going. Princess Raiyah bint al-Hussein is deep in conversation with a mathematical biologist. Riley is standing, again, beside the blackboard.
This time she isn’t posing. Instead, she is discussing matrix representations of the braid groups with Sasha Kosyak, a Ukrainian mathematician. She looks happy, animated and interested. Or, at least, happier than she had done all afternoon.
© The Times of London