Who’s afraid of Imogen Poots?

On the eve of her stage debut in Edward Albee’s masterpiece, the British star tells Chris Harvey why anger is her friend

Would you ask a male actor that?” says Imogen Poots, peering at me suspiciously. I’ve just asked when she realised her looks opened up the board for her in terms of roles. I would, I say – Steve Buscemi is a great actor but he didn’t get to play that many romantic leads. “But he works with Jim Jarmusch all the time,” she responds, “and that’s what every actor wants!”

Poots may not have worked with the celebrated indie director yet but she’s certainly been busy over the past few years, since she made a splash as a teenager enjoying a one-night stand with sexagenarian Michael Douglas in A Solitary Man (2009) and was the apple of daddy’s eye in the 2010 ITV remake of Bouquet of Barbed Wire. She went on to play porn baron Paul Raymond’s daughter in The Look of Love in 2013 and an endearing wouldbe suicide in the Nick Hornby adaptation A Long Way Down the folllowing year.

Since then, she’s mixed critically acclaimed films, such as last year’s violent thriller Green Room, with blockbusters like Need for Speed (2014), and worked with another director that every actor would kill to be cast by, Terrence Malick, on his 2015 film Knight of Cups.

That was “wonderful but mad”, she says, recalling the day she thought to ask Malick where her character was from. “He said, ‘Oh well, she’s essentially like smoke; she’s from nowhere and, uh, everywhere’, and I said, ‘Right, OK, great…’.” Now, at 27, Poots is taking on a play – her first – Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which Imelda Staunton and Conleth Hill will take the viciously duelling husband and wife roles made famous by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the 1966 film. Poots is playing Honey, the seemingly timid wife of Luke Treadaway’s biology professor. Described as “a mousey little type with no hips”, she’s a mostly passive counterpoint to the abusive leads. Is she planning to dowdy-down for the role? “I think I’m probably already in prime position,” she laughs. “I always think of that lyric” – she hiss-sings the opening to the Pixies’ song Tame – “hips like Cinderella”. She was nervous on the first day of rehearsals, she confesses, and felt compelled to tell the other cast members that she hadn’t acted on stage before, “in case they wanted to just throw me out of a window and find themselves a replacement”. Born in west London, Poots lives in New York these days, but her line in self-directed irony is altogether British. She’s unaffected, with a goofy charm that makes her very likeable; she’s also an Emersonquoting, political, and very sincere thinker. She doesn’t seem the passive, silent type: “I’m a mouse in that rehearsal room,” she says. “One of the best things about growing up is that you learn to shut up, don’t you?” She’s sitting across from me in an east London café, yards from where she’s been rehearsing. Her hair is long and less blonde than it often appears on screen, with a short, punky fringe. She’s wearing several unusual silver rings. On the first and index fingers of her left hand are the tattooed letters “A”, “Y”. They’re “for a friend who died”, she says, without mentioning the name of actor Anton Yelchin – with whom she starred in the horror remake Fright Night and Green Room. He was killed last year in a freak accident when his SUV rolled back and trapped him against gates at his home. “I don’t have any other tattoos,” she says, “but my friends and I just decided to get it done, because then they travel with you.”

Poots made a short-lived move to LA after shooting Fright Night in New Mexico in 2010 but left after her shared apartment was damaged by a fire in a cat-loving neighbour’s flat. “I didn’t have anywhere to live for a while but then I moved to New York and I’ve been so happy there.”

She left the West Coast untouched by the superficiality often attributed to Los Angeles – “I feel quite happy to say my hair didn’t get any more shiny” – although a number of roles that followed came via people she had met while there. New York, she says, feels like “the place where I can organise my bones”. It had been the right time to leave the UK, she adds, despite the fact she had just completed a role in Cary Fukunaga’s acclaimed Jane Eyre (2010) and appeared alongside “lovely Matt Smith”, as a Weimar Berlin cabaret singer in the BBC drama Christopher and His Kind. But Poots had reached a point when all she was being offered was “bonnets and period dramas” and admits “there wasn’t anything here I was crazy about.”

Honey is a role entrenched in a particular period, she notes (the play was written in 1962), when being “feminine” was seen as an achievement in itself. “It’s not so far away from the confines of what a woman is supposed to be now,” she adds – “the obsession with being thin, not taking up too much space, and your voice getting higher when you speak to men. It still exists, it’s very pervasive.”