If you don’t recognize Sofia Boutella in human form, it may help to envision her as a rag-sheathed mummy, an intergalactic warrior, or a preternaturally large-brained alien. Since starring in Kingsman: The Secret Service in 2015, Boutella has become a staple of Hollywood action flicks—from elevated horror to espionage thrillers to extraterrestrial sci-fi.

Over Zoom in mid-December, the stakes are lower. It’s the day before Boutella’s second FLAUNT shoot (the first was in 2017) and she joins me from her couch in a sweater, her choppy bangs framing an unmade face. In a French accent softened by over a decade in the US, she tells me about how she’s grown accustomed to seasonless LA Christmases, and about the mountain of scripts she’s pouring over at the moment. 

Though Boutella is spending her holiday tending to potential acting projects from her corner of Los Angeles, only a portion of her decades in entertainment have been spent as such—Boutella grew up in Algeria until she and her parents relocated to France amidst the Algerian Civil War. A ballet devotee from a young age, Boutella traded the craft in for hip-hop as a teenager. The latter took Boutella around the world, dancing backup for Madonna’s Confessions and Sticky & Sweet tours. She was a mainstay in music videos of the noughties and early 2010s, appearing alongside the likes of Rihanna, Ne-Yo, and Usher—even starring in Michael Jackson’s “Hollywood Tonight” video.

Soon, Boutella will star in the second season of Rogue Heroes, which will debut on MGM+ in the US on January 12th. The show is about the SAS (Special Air Service), an authority-evading unit of the British army formed during the Second World War. Boutella plays Eve Mansour, an impossibly chic, cigarette-yielding spy working for the French. Unlike the rest of the principal cast, who play real members of the unit (and are men), Boutella’s character is fictional, a gentle nod towards the many women who were integral to the liberation. She’s also, considering much of her filmic output, at last on the periphery of the violence, pulling strings from the safety of Cairo. 

Boutella plays Mansour with subtlety and depth. She’s calculating and seductive, using her feminine wiles to further her agenda. “I’m not necessarily like that,” Boutella clarifies, “but all these women had to [divert] the attention somewhere else, so that men—men were simpler when it came to women, and the more beautiful they saw them, the less they would suspect that they could be a threat. I love playing with that charm, which they all did,” she tells me. “And I loved experiencing the humanity within the tragic circumstances of that war. You know, remaining human and what makes a human a human, whether it’s falling in love or laughing or drinking and experiencing that sort of contrast. It’s an interesting character. I love playing her and she’s so far removed from who I am.” 

Despite her distance from the violence in Rogue Heroes, action and sci-fi constitute much of Boutella’s résumé. Yet, despite being a self-professed tomboy (Madonna gave Boutella her first pair of heels when she was in her 20s), her entry into action was inadvertent. Boutella’s mother is an architect and her father a composer, so high art was prized in the Boutella household. “My parents would never watch an action movie,” she admits. “I grew up watching all sorts of very creative, artistic, and intellectual films. I think that as I grew up, I developed my taste towards that. I was never drawn towards action films. And that’s why that style—that genre, really, came to me by surprise.” 

But it took some maximum energy action roles to get here. During her audition for Kingsman: The Secret Service—a high-octane spy movie co-starring Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, and Samuel L. Jackson—Boutella impressed director Matthew Vaughn with a limber round kick. Although Boutella didn’t know it at the time, the moment was a harbinger for how her dancing skills would be parlayed into action sequences to this day. From there, Boutella was a genre magnet, starring in the likes of Star Trek Beyond, Atomic Blonde, and Hotel Artemis.

In Rebel Moon—Part One: A Child Of Fire (and its sequel Rebel Moon—Part Two: The Scargiver), Boutella plays Kora, a warrior who forms an interplanetary army to defend her home against pillaging colonizers. The films’ predilection for sentient robots notwithstanding, Boutella saw humanity, and herself, in the script. “I wrote him [director Zack Snyder] a letter when I got the part. I felt close to the character because I left Algeria at such a young age, when I was 10 years old…When I was in Algeria, we lived through a civil war, so it’s really something that I could feel like because of the journey of Kora, I could feel that I could relate to it…It was interesting for me to explore a part of my story in this character.” I mention that despite their dismissal, sci-fi plots often analogize real-world conflict. “It’s the history of the world isn’t it?” she muses, “The Ottoman Empire, if you look at the Roman Empire—[it’s all about] the invaders, really.”

Even though both films topped Netflix’s movie charts, they were largely slated by critics. As someone who’s self-critical and her own “worst enemy,” this was a reception Boutella struggled with: “It was hard to see the photos of the film we’ve worked so hard to develop and cared so much about, and seeing your face with negative headlines,” she admits. Action films often incite more caustic reviews than other genres, so how does she cope with the criticism? “Ultimately, there’s nothing I can do about it once it’s out. And it can be very good when it’s nice, right? But also, what are you going to do with that information anyway?… And when it’s negative, it eats away at you. So maybe it’s best to not pay attention to it,” she concludes. Later, she insists that there’s not one project in her past she wishes she hadn’t done, “I think all my experiences were very formative.” 

Like most actors, Boutella is reluctant to be pigeonholed, and despite coming across grateful for her success, is getting restless. “I genuinely don’t want to be stuck in the action genre and it’s something that I want to be careful to not just keep repetitively doing. It’s something that I enjoy doing very much but it’s not what drives me—as an audience, first of all, it’s not what I am drawn towards particularly—but I also want to make sure that I pay attention to my calling as an artist, and it’s not particularly towards action,” she explains. (That’s not to say she’s giving up on it, she assures me: she merely plans to be selective about what roles she takes on.) At the moment, the scripts she’s receiving are varied, “which I’m really happy about.”

And what about how far Boutella has come? Or rather, how has her life changed since she graced the FLAUNT pages eight years ago? “I’ve worked more. I’ve gained more experiences. I’ve experienced life…I suppose I’m the same, but I keep pushing. I live in the same place. I haven’t gotten married. I don’t have kids, so I’m really, really focused on work.”

The story that unravels around Boutella is one of a hungry actor who won’t succumb to typecasting, or, for that matter, cast aside at all. “I still feel like I’m very young in this profession. I still feel like there’s so much I’d like to do. I don’t think it will ever go away, but I’m always feeling and thinking, ‘What can I do now?’ It’s exciting. There’s fear that comes with the excitement, but it’s an exciting fear, it’s not a fear that numbs me.”

Rogue Heroes Season 2 debuts on MGM+ in the US on Sunday, Jan. 12th

Photographed by Michael Muller

Styled by Christian Stroble at Opus Beauty

Written by Juno Kelly

Hair: Andy LeCompte at The Wall Group

Makeup: Sabrina Bedrani at The Wall Group

Flaunt Film: Isaac Dektor and Wyatt Stromer