Yes. I hadn’t worked in about a year. There wasn’t anything significantly different from anything I had already done and then I emailed my agent, having watched Valhalla, that same night, and I was like, ‘I just want to work with Nicolas’ and he emailed me back two weeks later: ‘Well Nick has this script but you are not right for it.

The character is a Latino woman, older. You could just try, go in see him and talk.’ Nic and I had met actually in Melbourne, the first time I ever did any kind of press. I went to Australia for ten days, through Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane.

I did three days in each promoting An Education. So we had already met. He is just the most tender man. He is hilarious. He knows exactly what he wants and is brutally honest. He is also one of the kindest men, honestly, and I feel extremely lucky to become one of his friends as well as working with him.

- Why didn’t you work for the year beforehand?

As much I wanted to I just couldn’t find something that I felt justified in doing. There was just too much that was similar to the parts I’d played before and things I had already done.

I felt that until I found something that I felt excited about in terms of something different, I was going to wait.

- What sort of roles were you being offered on the back of An Education; characters with quirks?

Yeah. It was like ‘The Girl Who Wore Black Eye Make up and was into The Ramones.’ It was just lots of stuff like that. And as brilliant as they were, there wasn’t a good enough reason for me to do them.

And then costume drama, British things - I have by no means done enough work at all in that area but I felt I had just come out of a really long two years of doing lots of British TV, and lots of costume drama, Austen and Dickens, and I just didn’t feel like going back into that territory.

I just thought that I should wait. Then Drive came along and then I did Shame with Steve McQueen and then I just suddenly found all these exciting things, but there was definitely a time when I thought there wasn’t much for me.

- Much like Ryan Gosling, rather than chasing big-money blockbusting parts, you’ve found really interesting pictures

I have always been interested in human stories and I probably lean towards drama really and those character parts are more interesting, generally. The part that I did in this and in Shame, they just weren’t there.

I haven’t been strategic about picking the size of the project but I have found that a lot of the most interesting stuff has been in the independent films so that’s what Drive was and Shame but then Gatsby is an amazingly interesting role and an amazing cast but a massively different budget and scale. It has just been where the parts have been.

- The part in The Great Gatsby, Daisy, was much coveted; were you a big F. Scott Fitzgerald fan?

I’d tried to read The Beautiful and The Damned at school, but I only read The Great Gatsby before I auditioned. It’s a great role. With Daisy I think her biggest problem is that she feels very two dimensional, she feels in herself that she doesn’t have very much to offer to the world but she is continuing this guise of being fascinating and interesting and it pains her that she doesn’t have anything to back that up.

People talk about whom Fitzgerald drew from to write Daisy and there are elements of Zelda Sayre and of another woman he met called Ginevra King so that’s fascinating.

I love reading about Zelda and her life and I think Daisy is just struggling with not finding herself interesting, and trying to fill the air, basically. I don’t think she is hard-hearted either. I could defend her for hours. I haven’t played anything like that before so it is exciting, something different.

- And how do the paparazzi treat you nowadays?

I haven’t had any problem in London. In LA if they find out where you are living then it is quite hard. LA is worse. I have no problem in London.

- What can you say about your Steve McQueen movie, Shame?

We shot it at the beginning of the year. It is Michael Fassbender who plays a guy living in New York struggling with loneliness and I play his sister, his slightly worried sister who comes to stay with him - the sister is a struggling artist and really it is a story about people struggling with loneliness - and incidents of hilarity ensue, as you can imagine (laughs!).

- I understand the character is quite terrifying

The character did terrify me. I had no idea. She’s an outrageous person, loud, uncompromising, very unlimited and brash and I begged Steve to give me the job and then afterwards it was like, ‘Sh*t. I now have no idea!’

But I just felt at that point there was a lot that I wanted to exercise. It was just one of the best experiences ever.

Drive is out now. Take a look at some images from the movie.

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