As Juno Temple and I sit outside at Los Angeles’ Burbank studios to discuss her role in Disney’s Maleficent, a crow swoops down like a dark shadow over us and lands, menacingly, on our table, its black iridescent wings outstretched. In the Californian sunshine, this aerial assault is so timely, it’s as if the studio has engineered it for us. “It’s Maleficent!” Temple cries, her eyes widening in cartoon-style, “Like Angelina Jolie is present.”
The 24-year-old British actress stars as the young fairy Thistletwit, alongside a winged and horned Jolie, in the revisionist tale about the Mistress of All Evil from Disney’s original 1959 Sleeping Beauty. Whether you think the film, directed by special effects guru Robert Stromberg, is a triumph or something slightly short of that, the casting is spot on. Jolie is a dead ringer for the dark queen, even without visual enhancements; and the mental leap from Temple, tiny and ethereal in a dinky lilac vintage dress before me, to a bonkers, teenage pixie is small. She’s like a sprite in beaten-up biker boots; and she says she feels an affinity to fairies too. “I had this imaginary world where fairies were my friends. If you told six year-old Juno that she’d one day play a Disney fairy, she’d totally freak out,” she enthuses at an alarming speed, her Somerset-bred accent now submerged in thick, twangy Los Angelino (she has been a city resident since 2008). Her vocal pitch and perpetual sense of wonder could still be mistaken for a six-year old’s. “I still have one foot in that magical world. I never want to lose that.”
If taken on first impressions alone, it might be easy to dismiss Temple as a gushy, Bonnie Langford type, a child star trapped in the body of a woman (she started acting when she was eight). But this would be a mistake. In her career, which has already spanned 32 feature films and an EE Rising Star Bafta awarded last year, Temple has shown a taste for darkly complex, unstable female characters which she has embraced with emotional maturity.
After early turns as spiky, petulant school girls in films like Notes on a Scandal in 2002 – a part she won at her first professional audition – and Joe Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement in 2007, she has explored the borders of the female psyche in mainly independent films.
She has played a 12-year-old Texan trailer trash girl whose virginity is offered as collateral to a hitman in Killer Joe; a stripper-cum-sex worker in Afternoon Delight; a lesbian lycanthrope in Jack and Diane; a schizophrenic insomniac in Magic Magic; and the murdered girlfriend of a man with Satanic powers, played by Daniel Radcliffe, in Horns out later this year. That’s more edgy, challenging roles than most actresses take on in a lifetime.
“I usually like to play a woman who’s got s— going on,” she tells me. “I’m not sure I ooze leading lady, I’m not the high school catch. I’ve been lucky with characters, but some are real headf—-.” She talks as if she’s on fast forward. “That’s why it’s so important to have a director you trust, who can bring your feet back to earth when you’re weeping in a hole after being beaten up.” She remembers Joe Wright reassuring her, when, at 16, she was left traumatised by the sexual abuse scene in Atonement: “Your character is f—ed up, but Juno’s okay.” She says now: “I’ve had to do a couple of rape scenes and they’re f—ing rough. There’s a brutal one in Horns, then I have to play dead. I’m not good at it because I have an overactive vein in my neck. It’s screaming: ‘I’m not ready to die yet!’”

Playing such intense roles back-to-back in the contracted shoots of low budget films can take its toll. She stopped sleeping during Magic, Magic, which, she says, helped with her character’s mental breakdown. And she has just wrapped Len & Company, about a record producer played by Rhys Ifans, in which she’s a pop star who overdoses. “I had some bad dreams with that one. I get very involved in my roles. I want people to think it’s all really happening. If I’m in it, I’m in it. At the end of an indie, you can feel like a wet rag that’s been wrung dry.”
Temple is willing to go, emotionally, where other actresses fear to tread to confront the unpalatable head on. But then, rebel spirit is in her DNA. Her father is Julien Temple, punk aficionado and director of the 1979 Sex Pistols documentary The Great Rock and Roll Swindle as well as videos for The Rolling Stones and The Kinks. His sister and Juno’s aunt is Nina Temple, the last secretary of the British Communist Party; while their father, Langdon, ran Progressive tours, a travel agency specialising in Communist countries. Temple and his wife, producer Amanda Pirie, instilled their daughter and her two younger brothers Leo, now 20, and Felix, 14, with a healthy disregard for convention; they hung out with The Clash’s Joe Strummer and family, and attended to Glastonbury festival regularly from an early age.
The children were encouraged to follow their own creative spirits. Their home, a 14th century house in Taunton, Somerset, was a playground for their imaginations. “As kids, we lived in this magical world and roamed free in the gardens. I was obsessed with Alice in Wonderland. My dad cut the hedges so that they started shorter and grew taller, so I could run up and down and feel like I was shrinking.” She still looks enthralled. “I was the kind of girl who’d peep through her bedroom keyhole to check if her dolls were moving.”
Her fascination with fairy tales was ignited when her father screened Jean Cocteau’s La belle et la bete and The Red Shoes for her as a little girl. She says she was always drawn to the tales’ darker characters.
“I was constantly in fancy dress and in character as a kid.” She cringes. “I would sometimes be a Russian refugee with a little doll begging for food. If my mother ruptured the fantasy and called me by my real name, I’d say. ‘But who is this Juno?’”
Her parents weren’t surprised when she said she wanted to become an actress. So her father cast her, at eight, in his film about French anarchist Jean Vigo (although he cut the scene) and Pandaemonium, two years later, about Wordsworth and Coleridge. It was enough to give Temple the pluck, at 12 years old, to attend the Notes on a Scandal audition and nail the role of Blanchett’s sulky teenage daughter.
By the time she left Bedales, the liberal arts boarding school she attended in Hampshire, Temple had worked on eleven films culminating in St Trinian’s 2: The Legend of Fratton’s Gold which she filmed during her A-levels. (She says that the film’s star Rupert Everett co-wrote the essay she did for her A Level drama coursework, for which she got a C+).
With a steady flow of parts since then, she never had time to go to drama school and moved to LA after school. This time has left its mark, on more than just her accent. She has learned to cope with the inevitable blows of rejection – “I still weep like child, when I don’t get a part I wanted. But it no longer feels like a teenage break-up” – and has recently conceded “the importance of downtime” to decompress from her roles. “If I’m having a bad day, I put on lingerie, a silk robe and fluffy pumps and walk around the house or bake something,” she giggles. “I’m just crazy about nice knickers.”
She lives in a 1920s bungalow filled with vintage clothes and British flags in Los Feliz, near Hollywood, with her boyfriend, actor Michael Angarano, whom she met on the set of 2012’s Brass Teapot. Temple has a playful, saucy spirit: she once collected Angarano from the airport in nothing but underwear, heels and a raincoat.
There’s a physicality to her behind the impishness. She has never shied away from sexual subjects or nudity in her work: in Killer Joe she stands full-frontal before Matthew McConaughey – and she learned to strip for Afternoon Delight. “Learning to lap dance was liberating. It made me more at ease with my body,” she tells me. “But we all have: ‘Am I smart or pretty enough?’ moments. I’m more comfortable about nudity when I’m playing someone else, but putting on a bathing suit at a pool party? That’s still intimidating.”
And we’re back on the subject of skimpy clothing. I can attest that Temple really is crazy about knickers. She spends hours sketching designs: her latest include a surrealist collection covered in lobsters and Dali-esque melting clocks.
If only there was more time. But alas, she has four films scheduled for next year including Sin City 2, an adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd with Carey Mulligan and an HBO music special directed by Martin Scorsese and produced by Mick Jagger, who knows her father, though she doesn’t remember them hanging out: “I was too distracted by fairies in the garden,” she snorts.
All this whimsy has got me daydreaming now, about the kind of actress Temple will be, when she can no longer pass as a teen. Kate Winslet’s indie roles spring to mind, so does Helena-Bonham Carter in her Fight Club phase. “Will Juno Temple ever hit puberty?” she anticipates my question. “I think so. I really hope so…” She lets out an endearingly witchy cackle.

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