In some ways, if only on the surface, Rhona Mitra led a charmed Hollywood existence. From the late 1990s and into the 2010s, the British actor starred in lots of hit US TV – series such as Boston Legal, The Last Ship and Nip/Tuck – alongside movies like Ali G Indahouse, Sweet Home Alabama and an Underworld sequel. She was typecast, often as English, haughty and dangerous, but she was busy. She made money. She had a house. There are numerous reasons she left it all behind, she tells me. But if she were to sum up why she brought her time in America to a close, it would go a little something like this.
“Los Angeles is a machine that runs on sales,” the 49-year-old explains, with a sonorous, sharply enunciated calm, from her new home in Uruguay. “It’s the stock market. It doesn’t care about conserving souls. It will use, abuse, rape and pillage until it’s done with you, and a lot of people lose themselves to it. It’s multilayered as to how and why I had to leave. But fundamentally, it was to save my soul.”
