Meet AMY JACKSON (aka Mrs Ed Westwick), the Bollywood sensation

At the end of Amy Jackson’s first film audition, the director asked her a question: ‘Can you dance?’ Jackson – a then 16-year-old model from Liverpool who at that point had never acted and, let’s be clear, never danced professionally – was used to the modelling industry where everything was, in her words, ‘a whole blag’. So she said yes, of course she could dance. ‘It just rolled out of my mouth! I didn’t think I’d actually have to dance!’

Most actors would have probably got away with it. Jackson, however, was auditioning for Madrasapattinam, a huge Indian film, made and set in Chennai. ‘And little did I know that Indian cinema is all about dance!’

Jackson, now 32, who announced on Thursday she is expecting a baby with her husband, Gossip Girl actor Ed Westwick, is arguably the biggest British actress in Indian cinema. I mean really, truly big. That first film of hers, Madrasapattinam, spent 15 weeks at number one at the Chennai box office.

Since then, she has starred in 17 Indian films – including 2.0 in 2018, which then had the biggest budget (£58 million) in Indian film history. She has 13.6 million followers on Instagram. And, as for dancing, a YouTube video of Jackson performing a dance in the 2015 film I has 29 million views alone.

She also has no Asian heritage and absolutely zero links to India. So, I suppose, the obvious question is: how?

Jackson was born in the Isle of Man but moved to Croxteth, Liverpool when she was around three, and then to nearby Woolton with her mum after her parents separated. Her father worked as a radio presenter for BBC Radio Merseyside and her mother was a riding instructor for the Riding for the Disabled Association. ‘It was a very normal, working-class upbringing. We lived with my grandma in a two up, two down.’

Things began to change on Jackson’s 15th birthday. Her sister – nine years Jackson’s senior and now a secondary-school teacher – had promised to buy her a pair of boots as a present. Specifically, she had promised to buy her the patterned, furry-trimmed boots from Ed Hardy that almost all fashion-conscious teenage girls would have killed for in the Noughties. You could only get them in Manchester, so the duo trundled on a train to the Arndale centre. When they arrived at the station, Jackson was approached by a modelling scout. This is unsurprising.

When I meet Jackson for tea in a corporate meeting room before her YOU photoshoot, she is shorter than I was expecting, but just as beautiful. She’s wearing baggy beige trousers and a baggy beige top and hasn’t been to hair and make-up yet. She asks if the interview is being filmed and when I say no she is relieved. ‘I look like death warmed up.’ She categorically doesn’t: her skin is clear, her hair is shiny, her eyes are massive.

Jackson signed to an agency and started doing various modelling jobs. ‘I thought, this is great. I can get a little bit of extra pocket money and go get more Ed Hardy boots!’

A year later, in 2009, she entered the Miss Teen World beauty pageant. Jackson was accepted as the British candidate, so she ordered a giant ‘pink meringue’ dress on Ebay, which she still has stashed in a box underneath her bed, flew to Houston, Texas, and won the competition.

After her pageant victory, the Daily Mail ran an article about Jackson that was spotted by the director for Madrasapattinam, A L Vijay, who was staying in London at the time. He needed a young UK teenager to play the part of a British governor’s daughter living in 1940s India and he thought Jackson looked right for it. He rang at least 30 modelling agencies until he found the one that represented her and then he invited her to audition in London at 9am the next day.

Jackson had never been to London – besides the pageant trip to Houston, the furthest she had travelled was a family holiday to Spain – and she hadn’t acted in anything other than school plays. ‘I said to my modelling agency, “Listen guys, I don’t think this is for me. I’ve never acted before. Do they know I’ve never acted? Is it worth it? What are my chances?” And they said, “They’re really keen.”’

So she and her dad woke up at 4am and ‘rattled down the motorway in his Nissan Micra’. The audition was in a swish hotel room that overlooked the Thames – Jackson’s dad was invited to sit in, too – and, acting wise, ‘I sort of winged it’. It must have worked. By the end of the day, Jackson had been offered the job.

Two months later, she was filming in Chennai, a city of 12 million people in Southeast India. (Technically, only Hindi-language films made in Mumbai are ‘Bollywood’ films. Those made in the Tamil language, mainly in Chennai, like this one, are ‘Kollywood’ films.) Her mum came with her and the pair lived in a hotel room and spent their days on set. Jackson remembers her mother constantly offering to help the costume designers with last-minute stitching.

Madrasapattinam was a big-budget period drama. There were at least 200 people on set, the days could last for 20 hours and the shoot took three months in total. Outside filming, Jackson’s time was packed with dance lessons – ‘they called my bluff!’ – and language tutoring. Her character in Madrasapattinam was English-speaking anyway, but Jackson now says she has ‘good conversational’ Tamil and Hindi.

Indian cinema is becoming more global, so Jackson often has English-speaking characters. In her most recent film Crakk, a thriller set between Mumbai, London and Warsaw, she plays an English-speaking Polish Europol agent. I had read that some of her roles – where she had lines in Hindi or Tamil – were dubbed. She says this is not the case.

After those initial 90 days in Chennai, Jackson went back to Liverpool. ‘The film was done and I thought that was great but it was just a job. I didn’t see it as a career. I thought, ‘Wow. That was amazing. I loved it. Now I’ll go back to school.”’ She enrolled in sixth form and considered becoming a lawyer. But two days in, she was bored. ‘The film had really opened my eyes to a different way of life.’

Luckily, when she returned to Chennai a year later for the premiere, there were plenty of film directors offering her jobs. Jackson got an agent in Mumbai and later one in Los Angeles, and her mum rang the sixth form and told them her daughter would not be coming back.

Jackson spent the next three years filming across India and living out of hotels. She practised yoga, attended ayurvedic retreats and learned how to cook Keralan stews – ‘although I’m still a bit of a weakling [with spice]’. For one film, Jackson had to wear a sari so, on her days off, she would walk around Mumbai in the traditional Indian outfit to practise. Saris require complicated wrapping. Can she still do it?

‘I can give it a good go!’ she says.

Eventually, Jackson bought an apartment on the seafront in Mumbai. I had read that at one point, she had owned three properties in the city. ‘I wish. I would be a very rich woman now.’

There is, however, big money in Indian film. In 2015, Jackson starred in Singh is Bliing alongside Akshay Kumar. The film grossed around £10.75 million in its first week and Kumar, then 48, reportedly earned £24.5 million that year alone, which was around what Brad Pitt and George Clooney earned that same year in Hollywood – combined. And the industry has become richer since. This month, Forbes India estimated that the highest-paid actor in India – Joseph Vijay Chandrasekhar, aged 50 – was making between £12 million and £25 million per film. 

Jackson won’t reveal how much she is paid and does not know if there is a gender wage gap in Indian cinema as there is in Hollywood. But, she says of her first film, ‘I was just happy with my fee. It was, obviously, more money than I had ever seen in my lifetime.’ She continues, ‘I come from a working-class family in Liverpool. My mum was earning £15,000 a year as a wage. Having these opportunities enabled me to help my mum and my family and change my life.’ It’s true; recently, Jackson bought a house for her mother in Hertfordshire.

Jackson recently sold her flat in Mumbai and bought a house, also in Hertfordshire, where she now lives with her husband and five-year-old son. (More on them later.) When she films in India, she stays in hotels.

It sounds, somewhat, like she lives a strange double life: one where she is hugely famous in the most populated country on earth, but not especially well-known in her actual home. When I ask if she gets recognised much in the UK, Jackson replies, ‘By Indian audiences, yes.’

I wonder if, when Jackson was starting out, she found it jarring – boring even – to return to Liverpool, given her life in India was full of film sets and gigantic parties. She balks at this. ‘We’re from Liverpool! We can have a party in an empty room!’

Jackson is ‘really not sure’ why Bollywood embraced her, although she does have a semi-jokey theory. The summer she met the director of her debut, Madrasapattinam, she had dyed her hair red. The film is often referred to as the Indian version of Titanic and, ‘Kate Winslet was obviously a redheaded young Englishwoman in Titanic’. So maybe that was why they liked Jackson’s look. If that’s true, I say, you really ought to thank your teenage hairdresser in Liverpool. Jackson laughs, ‘It was definitely a box dye.’

Bollywood has its critics. The 42-year-old Indian actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas has spoken about problems with ‘colourism’; namely, how fairer-skinned actresses are preferred to darker-skinned actresses. Chopra Jonas has said she was made to look less dark herself, with make-up and ‘blast lighting’. Jackson does not want to comment on this.

In the past, however, she has made remarks about how she had to ‘work hard to be accepted’ and that there had been ‘a few negative comments’. I ask Jackson what she meant by this. Was it that she had to work hard to be accepted as an actress, or as a British person entering an Indian industry?

‘I don’t come from an acting background, so I had to prove myself and my worth and really work hard,’ she says. ‘It took a lot of dedication.’ Were the aforementioned negative comments about her lack of experience, or something else? ‘I can’t remember!’

In 2021, Jackson met the Gossip Girl actor Ed Westwick at a racing event at Silverstone. Westwick, 37 and with 11.1 million Instagram followers, proposed in January this year and the couple married in August at a three-day wedding in Italy that was covered by Vogue Italia. There were 220 guests, including A L Vijay, the director who had liked her box-dyed hair. Of course, 220 guests is paltry compared to the Indian weddings Jackson went to when she lived there. ‘They were incredible! They have like 2,000 people!’ She didn’t go to the £450 million, six-day-long Ambani wedding in Mumbai this year (when Anant Ambani, the son of India’s richest man, married millionaire’s daughter Radhika Merchant), but she knows of the couple. ‘I think everybody knows of them.’

Jackson’s son, Andreas, is from a previous relationship with the British hotelier George Panayiotou. He lives with her and Westwick and their three dogs. Andreas is, she says, obsessed with animals. He is currently petitioning her for a cow. She would like to give in.

She is, in her words, ‘a mother first’ and an actress second. And although she took Andreas to film sets in India when he was younger, now that he attends a British primary school I wonder if she would rather work more here. She has already done acting projects outside Indian cinema, such as the US TV show Supergirl in 2017 and an uncredited role in Guy Ritchie’s 2023 film Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. ‘I go where the work is,’ she says. But ‘I would never want to turn my back on [Bollywood]. It’s really part of my life and it’s given me everything.’ Does she see herself acting in Bollywood films when she’s in her 80s? ‘Never say never,’ she says. Although, ‘I don’t know whether my hips would move the same!’