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!’”
posted by Ana 
posted on Jun 07, 2014