Amidst Hollywood’s homogeny, rising star Jessica Henwick is telling a different story.

For all the ways acting can provide a handy dose of escapism from the sociopolitical hellfire in which we live, Henwick says that’s just the half of it. In order to inhabit a role, she explains, you do more than cut your hair and wield a sword. You try someone else’s psyche on for size. You take on their personal traumas, emotional hang-ups, idiosyncrasies. And as hard as it may be to properly enter into a new character space, it can be even harder to exit. It’s an occupational hazard: You begin to blur the lines between your baggage and your character’s baggage. You lose track of where they end and you begin.

“In The Gray Man, my character is super aggro,” says Henwick. “She’s irritated and inflammatory the whole time—constantly riled up. And when we were filming, I’d notice that I was leaving set feeling that tension. I’d be more confrontational than usual, or short-fused.”

Nearly a decade prior, in a markedly different character study, Henwick played Amy Lang, an eager lawyer-in-training on the BBC serial drama Silk. She says she felt an immediate kinship with the character, a keen, wide-eyed pupil who, early on in the show, witnesses something unspeak- able at her law firm. Her naivety deflates as she confronts the grotesque realities of her “dream job,” while in parallel, Henwick was also becoming increasingly jaded as Hollywood’s dark underbelly began to reveal itself to her.

“I was that young, wide-eyed actress,” the artist recalls. “And slowly, day by day, I was seeing more of the industry up close—the harder parts. That was this major turning point for me. I felt like I was processing my own experience through Lang.”

What she knows now is this: Such things are central to the muddied, nonlinear progression of womanhood. “As a woman, you have to harden yourself, prepare yourself. You’ll see things and feel things that cause you pain, or make you feel like you’re in danger,” Henwick explains. “At the same time, you have to remember that there’s a really beautiful side of this industry, too, [and] that you chose to be here, and you’re grateful for it. That you love what you do.” It’s hardly the shimmering and hopeful Hollywood ideal, but for Henwick, acting has afforded her a feminine rite of passage—a way of trading in the people-pleasing campus of girlhood for the firmer boundaries of the adult world.

Fortunately, Henwick has her ways of coping—small tactics designed to help her prioritize her own mental health. She’s religious about talk therapy; she reads 19th-century novels; she writes (mostly scripts these days, though she admits she has a draft of an original novel sitting in a drawer somewhere). Occasionally, she attempts one of her mother’s recipes, which typically lacks measurements of any kind. (“You’d have to stand there and watch my mother cook to know how much of anything to use. It’s all so intuitive to her,” she marvels.)

But maybe most restoratively, she hikes— alone—spending long stretches of time hurtling along quietly. And while scaling a mountain solo has its risks, Henwick has learned to curtail her anxiety. “You do have to be afraid to some degree because things will kill you in the wild,” she concedes. “You need to be wary of danger, but without letting it consume you.”

Ahead of ambitious treks, Henwick often returns to a beloved passage by Cheryl Strayed, who hiked the Pacific Crest Trail solo in the ’90s before penning Wild, her account of the experience. “I have to find this quote for you so I won’t butcher it!” she says, punching keys on her laptop while she searches. When she finds what she’s looking for, she reads aloud: “Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are often told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.”

In Henwick’s case, this fragment of wisdom is densely layered. Yes, it’s about swallowing fear, digesting it, reshaping its contours, changing its chemical properties. But it’s also about storytelling—about the ways we make sense of the world by condensing life into the container of “plot,” then whittling ourselves into characters therein. There’s power in understanding that. When it serves her, Henwick can access the sword-wielding sturdiness of Colleen Wing, the unapologetic laissez-faire of Bugs, or the humility of June. And at once, she can play the role of Jessica Henwick— finding space to inhabit a story that’s hers, pieced together of her own hard-won toolkit of memories, boundaries, and eccentricities—where she alone is protagonist enough.

“You get tired of reading, or writing, or watching the same story over and over,” Henwick muses. “The classic hero’s journey. The most standard plot structure. Someone saves the cat, blah blah.”

She pauses. “I mean, if it works, it works—there’s no denying that. But I’m so inspired by the peo- ple who are reinventing the wheel. Those are the films I want to be in, the books I want to read, the scripts I want to write, the characters I want to play. How motivational is that—that we can create something without a classic hero or a traditional climax that’s still powerful?” She laughs, or sighs, or clears her throat. Maybe all three at once.

“God, there’s so much power in remembering that you’re the storyteller. We should remind each other of that more often.” ❤