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. .