Faster, Pussycat

From a glimmer in Hollywood’s eye to a blazing presence in six mega movies—alongside Denzel, Warren, Justin, Miles, and more—Haley Bennett’s big moment is here right...this...second!

- Caryn James

A sudden monsoon descends upon New York minutes before I arrive at the spacious TriBeCa loft of Haley Bennett. Though we’ve never met before, it takes her no time to glance at my flats and say, “Want to borrow my boots so you don’t ruin your shoes?” She pulls out bright yellow Wellies (she’s wearing gray ones), scurries into the bedroom, and returns with what she assures me are “perfectly clean socks.”

This is not movie-star behavior. And at the moment Bennett is not quite a movie star, a situation about to change in a flash. Exactly one week after I borrowed her boots, she sparkled in Christian Dior couture at the Toronto Film Festival, where Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven—a remake of the classic 1960 western in which she’s the lone woman riding and shooting alongside Chris Pratt, Denzel Washington, and Ethan Hawke—was the opening-night feature.

Bennett has an even juicier role in the recently released psychological thriller The Girl on the Train—directed by Tate Taylor (The Help)—as Megan, a blond stranger so captivatingly enigmatic that her disappearance becomes the obsession of Emily Blunt’s Rachel, a troubled alcoholic. When Rachel spots Megan on the deck of a picture-perfect suburban house in her underwear and an open robe, she wonders—just as movie audiences are sure to—who is that? Then there’s the first movie Warren Beatty has directed in 18 years: He cast Bennett as a sexy would-be actress in November’s long-anticipated tale of Howard Hughes’s Hollywood, Rules Don’t Apply.