Imogen Poots is tired of walking on eggshells. ‘Being English, being polite, it’s exhausting,’ she says, sipping sparkling water which, to her chagrin, has arrived with lemon wedges, not lime (although she’s too polite to complain). We’re at Soho’s Dean Street Townhouse and the 30-year-old actress, dressed in a frill-collared Isabel Marant blouse, once blonde hair newly light brown, is letting loose on the fact that women who speak up get a bad name. Qualities such as ambition are coveted, but in men, not in women.

Poots thinks that Hollywood’s sexual abuse problem — which she describes as ‘systemic’ — is inseparable from the idea of women as submissive. ‘Still I come up against it a lot, where if you come to work and you’re quite opinionated in a good way for the benefit of the project, that can often be perceived as “you have an attitude” or that you’re hostile.’ The way that female characters are imagined on the page is still ‘pretty shocking’, she says, and women have been expected not to fight this. ‘You go along with the plan,’ she says. ‘You don’t question things.’

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