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The star of Alice in Wonderland on her new role as Jane Eyre, why she turned her back on ballet and how her love of photography allows her to focus the lens away from her

I arrive for my interview with Mia Wasikowska 45 minutes early, barrelling into the hotel corridor as she leaps gawkily, girlishly through a door. We lock eyes, I recognise her, she smiles shyly, as if trying to remember who I am, then realises she has no idea. This 21-year-old, the highest-grossing female film star of 2010, one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, is clearly entirely unused to being recognised. Her expression shifts to friendly confusion, and she bounds off through another door.

Even when she’s completely silent, stories whisper over Wasikowska’s face, which explains her latest casting as Jane Eyre, a woman whose inner monologue bubbles with wit and defiance. The film opens with Eyre’s stricken flight from Thornfield Hall, after a betrayal by her great love, Rochester, and the camera focuses on Wasikowska’s stripped-bare face as she runs across sodden woodland, down wet paths, and lies on a rock in the hammering rain. The scene could easily veer into parody – the sort of watery, weepy cape-and-bonnet moment French and Saunders might once have sent up. But Wasikowska never teeters into histrionics, she is always completely believable…

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