But, “he didn’t act until he was well into his thirties,” Huntington-Whiteley explained, “so he had this big chunk of life where he was a painters and decorator and he was on the door of clubs and he was on the market stall, trading.”
His years of cobbling it all together meant “he’s got that real groundedness,” she summed up of Statham, celebrating his 59th birthday July 26, “and I love the fact he will pass that on to our child as well.”
Not that the two had raced their way to that particular milestone.
Rather they put in the work to build that foundation, their official hard-launch coming at the 2011 Vanity Fair Oscars party, followed by a trip up the Met Gala steps months later, mere weeks before she made her big screen debut in Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
Her leap to the big screen had come on rather, er, fast and furious. “I got a phone call,” she recounted to Glamour in 2013. “I had an audition. Three weeks later I was on set.” But, like Statham, she spent her formative years strutting her way to success.
