Rose has been recently interviewed for ‘The Last Magazine’ and some new gorgeous pictures of her have been taken, be sure to check them all in the gallery and read the interview below :
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Photoshoots > 2017 | The Last Magazine [+ 8]
THE LAST MAGAZINE — In the new CBS All Access show The Good Fight, viewers are introduced to Maia Rindell, a young woman who has just passed the bar exam and lands a job at a prestigious law firm. It’s new, exciting, and a little daunting for Maia, and that’s before her life is swiftly upended by a family scandal. Stepping into the role is Rose Leslie, who herself is exploring uncharted territory, albeit without the chaos Maia endures. Residing in America for the first time while taking on a lead role in a celebrated franchise has given her something to channel into the character, but it’s also given her the momentum to break out as a new star.
Though Leslie is originally from Scotland, she spent enough of her life away to replace her accent with an English one. “I lived in France for about three years from ten to thirteen, so I kind of lost any Scottish accent when I was living there—I had some weird hybrid of a French-English accent,” she says. “Then I went back to Southern England and it was over, I went into the English accent.”
Raised with four siblings, Leslie’s proclivity towards acting may have simply been an effect of being the middle child. “There’s no other member of my family who is in the creative industry, so to speak,” she says. “I’m in the middle, the only ginger, older brother and sister and younger brother and sister. I think I got the bug from not being listened to. I think the middle child syndrome stepped in relatively early and I think I realized I needed to branch out. My [older] brother is intelligent and my sister is very sporty and intelligent, and I must have subliminally gone, Shit, you’re that, you’re that, I want to be something different.”
It didn’t take much for Leslie to pursue the acting path. “It wasn’t like an epiphany that made somebody stand still and go, This is what I need to do,” she explains. “It just felt brilliant, it felt natural, and I wanted to carry on following this particular path of getting up in front of people and performing.” She enrolled in drama school, but even there it was always about performing. “Some of it was theory obviously and some of it was practical, and I just remember only loving the practicality of it, and not really wanting to theorize on a long essay the reasons as to why I wanted to, so then it felt rather innate.”
Drama school helped get her representation, and before long she was getting auditions and small roles. She won a Scottish BAFTA for a television film called New Town, but her most widespread breakthrough came on Downton Abbey, after their costume director happened to see her in a play. As the ambitious housemaid Gwen Dawson, Leslie was part of the main cast of the show during season one. “It was the first television role I had where I knew I was going to be employed for six months,” she recalls. “I was always in bit parts before, but now suddenly it was a six-month gig that was just incredible to me.” Her character ended up representing a major theme in the show, the rise of the working class, and she even made an appearance in the final season as a refined woman unrecognizable to the estate. But Leslie remembers it more for the fond memories it gave her in her early twenties: “I was living in London with girlfriends, and the idea of getting into a car to drive off into the countryside to shoot for a day and have that happen five days a week was awesome.”