For Pullman fans, this kind of plucky self-confidence must sound familiar: it’s Lyra Belaqua, the novel’s crafty protagonist, who travels from Oxford to the Arctic Circle–aided by armored bears, flying witches and a truth-telling compass that only she can read–to rescue her kidnapped best friend. Richards read the trilogy with her mother when she was 9, then fell in love all over again when she saw the National Theatre’s stage version of “The Golden Compass” a year later. It’s not unusual for little girls to leave the theater dreaming of curtain calls, but that’s not quite how it happened for Richards. She didn’t want to be an actress; she wanted to be Lyra. “I feel like I can relate to her,” Richards says. “I like to think I’m quite brave. I stand up for myself. And I don’t let other people tell me what to do.” She glances at her mother and blushes a bit. “Well, unless it’s my mum.”
When Richards heard about the film version, which will costar Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig (also known as James Bond), she ventured from her home in Brighton, in the south of England, to Cambridge for the movie’s open casting call. Her mother agreed to take her on one condition: that Dakota wouldn’t be too upset when she got passed over. There were 10,000 other girls up for the part, after all, and Dakota had never acted before. “Usually, it’s a gut-wrenching decision,” says the film’s writer-director Chris Weitz (“About a Boy”). “You realize the whole time how much rests on the shoulders of this kid. But I didn’t have any doubts about Dakota. She looks not quite tamed, and that’s Lyra.” Weitz says he’s trying to keep his young star insulated on set so she can be a normal girl for as long as possible, but he knows there’s only so much he can do. “It was hard to cast someone, honestly, because you know that you may be doing them a disservice,” he says. “I don’t know if anyone can prepare Dakota for the kind of exposure that’s going to come with this. Especially in England, where the press can be merciless.”
Richards’s first round with the press, however, is a snap. She handles with charm questions about shuttling between school and set (“That’s quite annoying”) and meeting Kidman and Craig (“I figured if I did something wrong, they’d be, like, ‘Oh my God , why are we working with her?’ But they were really nice”). Finally the questions end, and she offers a polite handshake, then scrambles back out into the Arctic. It’s time to be Lyra again.
