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 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 would-be 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…’.” READ MORE