Laura Haddock - Lucrezia Donati

HEADS turned when Laura Haddock, 28, joined her Da Vinci’s Demons co-stars on stage at the TV series premiere in Florence, Italy. This London-born actress is a ravishing beauty.

And that one impulsive act of the audience confirmed her apt casting as Lucrezia Donati in David Goyer’s historical fantasy.

When we sat down for a chat a day later, she mirrored the poise and je ne sais quoi of her character.

What works in Haddock’s favour is her being plucked out of the shadows of mediocrity and propelled into the limelight, especially in this infancy stage of her career where there are a handful of TV credits (Honest, Monday Monday, How Not to Live Your Life and Upstairs Downstairs) and film nods (notably Captain America: The First Avenger and The Inbetweeners Movie) to her name.

Revisiting a fond memory in trying to land the role, she laughs: “I was doing another show and had to come down for my second audition. I was meeting Tom Riley (Leonardo da Vinci) and doing a chemistry reading. But I got stuck on my way, coming from Wales, and I kept phoning, saying, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming’.

“I think I ran into the audition at half-past six (it was meant to start at six o’ clock) and I was really panicked and flustered. I did a quick introduction, sat down with Tom, whom I’d never met, shook his hand and said: ‘We gonna do this scene’.

“The cameras started rolling, the lights were on and, in five words, we jumped into the scene. And instantly, there was a connection.

“I realised who Leonardo da Vinci was in that reading.”

And in the same way that Goyer found Riley to be perfect for the lead role of Da Vinci despite him not being “very Mediterranean-looking”, Haddock imbued the manipulative traits required for her multi-faceted character.

Delving into the confusing actions of her character, where viewers never quite know if she is good or self-servingly bad, Haddock maintains: “She is multi-dimensional and complex. My main feeling, after reading the script, was that she wasn’t just a beautiful woman.

“She wasn’t just an aesthetic. She was extremely in touch with her emotions. She had to be some- one else with all the different people she was meeting – and exercised a dissimilar side of her personality.”

Haddock admits her character is on the bolder side of herself, saying: “She is seemingly very complicated, using her sexuality as a weapon to aid her in situations. That was something I really had to work on as I know I’d never do so in real life.”

Like most people, Haddock also saw Da Vinci as this genius old man, wearing his greying long beard as proudly as he held his paint brush for iconic paintings like the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, The Vitruvian Man and Lady with an Ermine.

But history reveals he was so much more. More than a painter; and certainly more than the bastard son tag that haunted him. Pure genius, his inventions belied the confines of the conformist Italian Renaissance era.

And that is one of the things that astounded Haddock when she visited his museum while in Florence.

“What really struck me is that he wasn’t limited by genre,” she enthuses. “He didn’t just design one kind of invention. He was designing carts, bicycles and scuba diving suits. It was across the board. He was interested and curious about lots of things. As he was such a fast thinker, he would often start something, get bored and would discard it only to then have, many years later, somebody else come up with the idea he had started, but didn’t finish.”

Although Goyle blurs the lines between fact and fiction (much to the horror of Italians proud of their cultural legacy), while also dazzling with CGI, it is never at the cost of the development of his characters and the story.

Haddock praises: ‘They are intimate stories with a grand setting. David is so clever. He is writing for a vast ensemble cast. And he is writing for men and women of all ages and statuses. Everything is very honest and feels so natural. I can’t remember ever going to him, asking if he could change a line.”

The actress maintains her character isn’t a villain per se.

“I know her journey and why she does what she does,” she teases.

“I hope at the end of every episode, you have a different opinion of her. I can’t say all the things to justify the character and the way she is. What I do believe is that she is making decisions she genuinely doesn’t want to make. There is always conflict.”

Although guilt is an emotion that fails to impinge on Donati, Haddock says there is a chink in her armour – love. But her downfall isn’t written on the wall… yet!

• Da Vinci’s Demons airs on Fox (DStv channel 125 and TopTV channel 180) Monday nights at 9.45pm.