When I begin my phone conversation with Jessica Haines by telling her how insistently I prodded her publicist to set up our interview – the reverse is so often the case – she responds with a bashful laugh. “I can believe that,” she says, in a warm South African drawl. “Not many journalists have bothered tracking me down to Tunis!”
Haines sounds endearingly surprised that anyone might be interested in her away from the cinema screen, where she made such a startling arrival this year in Steve Jacobs’s “Disgrace” – which opens in the UK today, on the heels of an all-too-brief Stateside run in the fall.
This speaks both to the 30 year-old newcomer’s natural humility – if she is aware of just how good she is, she certainly hides it well – and her relative unfamiliarity with the ropes of the industry.
As if to literalize the point of just how far removed Haines is from Hollywood, I learn that she is in Tunisia not, as I had assumed, on some remote location shoot, but for a decidedly simpler reason: it’s where she lives, thanks to her husband’s banking career.
“I don’t really know where to call home at the moment,” she says. “My family’s in Natal [the East Coast of South Africa], but I studied in Cape Town and do a lot of work in Johannesburg. My husband’s job is taking us from Tunisia to Kenya soon. I’m just flying in and out all the time.”