When Nogueira wrote her script, the broader DC universe was still taking shape. She had no idea where, if at all, Superman would fit into her story, or that Gunn and Safran would love her script so much that they’d shift Supergirl forward to make it the second film in the series — or that the future of the franchise would soon rest on the padded shoulders of a 26-year-old Australian actor with one prior film credit.
High stakes for someone so green to it all. When Alcock first met Gillespie in his office in Leavesden, England, she showed up wearing a weathered beanie that she only realised later was a tea cozy. Gillespie tells me that he could see that the enormity of what was ahead was already weighing on her. “I think she was quite nervous, because it’s such an undertaking,” he says. “What struck me is just how candid and honest she was about that, and how she could talk openly about it. I loved that about her, that she wasn’t hiding anything.”
“I didn’t get into acting to be a movie star,” Alcock says of that first meeting. “I didn’t get into this [thinking], You know what I’m gonna do? Make it. So when I was met with that, I was kind of like, Oh no, I haven’t done the work” — the stunt training, the accent coaching, the long days on set — “to earn that or to validate that belief. I was just overwhelmed by the amount of work that was required to do that.”
“There’s a lot of responsibility,” Alcock acknowledges. “Who wouldn’t be overwhelmed?”
“Let’s go outside!” Alcock suggests excitedly, after surveying the final floor of artwork. We repair to Hyde Park just across the road. Like Supergirl, the restorative power of the yellow sun recharges her as she rushes away from the dog walkers and sunbathers toward the fields. She kicks off her ballet flats and lounges on her side, her head resting on her hand — grass stains be damned.
These small moments of respite are harder to come by these days. Alcock has been jet-setting between Supergirl promo duties and Atlanta, where the Supes sequel Superman: Man of Tomorrow is filming. She has at least one shoot, interview, or event on her schedule every day until September. (She was just on the phone to her team to ask if they could, please, just squeeze in a little break.)
The near-constant travel has been affecting Alcock “mind, body, and spirit,” she admits. The week before our museum trip turned picnic, she was at CinemaCon to present the film to a room of theatre owners. Before that was Kyoto, Japan, where she just wrapped on a movie about a girls’ trip gone wrong with Charli XCX and Hailey Benton Gates, and directed by the prolific Japanese auteur Takashi Miike. The trio communicated with him through a translator, but even then, Miike was “a man of few words” and, as Alcock says with sincere admiration, “a bit of a freak.” The Moment’s Aidan Zamiri stepped in as the “Western director” on set to accurately represent their interactions. (“A Western friendship is gonna look different from an Eastern friendship,” she explains.)
Shoes by Gianvito Rossi. Socks by Los Angeles Apparel.