It astonishes the way some folks who’ve been prescribed stardom proceed onto the tightrope as such with completely unmarketable names. We don’t need to get into the mistakes—it’s no one’s fault but their own—but we can at least examine a handful of those that have worked: Angelina Jolie, Tom Cruise, Jude Law, all of whom edited themselves into the omnipresent namesakes they are today.
    Gabriella Wilde (née Gabriella Zanna Vanessa Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe)—a lanky, pouty-lipped, private, sweet, picture perfect ingénue, here in New York for a wave of press in the lead up to the recently released The Three Musketeers—has definitely honed a silver-screen ready name, but she doesn’t exactly live up to it. The blonde Brit is not table dancing in Soho clubs, doing key bumps with the LDN glitterati. She’s not been pulled to the curb for 100 plus mph sports car craziness. Wilde could, to the contrary, rename herself Civilized—but that wouldn’t be a market-savvy edit, now, would it? Wilde will have to live her life as an oxymoron.
    A comely model-cum-actress, Wilde’s American debut sees her starring alongside brute British boys (Orlando Bloom and Luke Evans, to name a few) and porcelain-skinned babes. Wilde plays Constance, the Queen of France’s lady-in-waiting, whose sole purpose seems to be delivering quiet but poignant one-liners while batting her long lashes. And while there isn’t a lot of screen time to work with, Wilde nails it. Her silent downturned glances show sweetness, and while her tone and physicality might be a bit modern for a 16th-century period drama, no one’s likely to log any complaints.  
    After years of modeling and feeling generally bored, Wilde turned to acting, and The Three Musketeers was the perfect answer. Wilde was flown to Germany for a final audition, and producers paired her with the opposingly grizzled (and 19-year-old) Logan Lerman, (of last year’s The Kids Are Alright) aka the future D’Artagnan. “I auditioned with the kissing scene,” Wilde laughs. “We basically had a chemistry test with the director.” Did she enjoy working with them? “It was so much fun. Because we all filmed in Germany for three months, we became a little family unit.”
    Unfortunately, Constance is a daintily reserved character, something that Wilde resented while filming. “I didn’t get to sword fight, which was quite annoying,” she says. “Because it’s about the musketeers—their thing is to be brilliant swordsmen.”  But Constance anchors the film with a sense of romance, something necessary to a movie made up of primarily action scenes. And with her own description of the character—“Kind of precious, delicate, sheltered, but spontaneous,”—Wilde shows some depth. She owns perhaps the most powerfully delivered line in the film when Constance proves unimpressed with D’Artagnan’s country boy swagger. She deadpans, “In the battle of wits, you, sir, are unarmed.” For those keeping an eye on film’s next wave of gorgeous and talented: arm yourselves.