Scent and sensibility

At just 16, Hurd-Wood has starred in three Hollywood films. Discovered in 2003, after a year-long, nationwide search for the perfect Wendy Darling for Peter Pan, Hurd-Wood went on to do two further films: the first was An American Haunting, and now you will be able to see her starring in the latest, as the doomed Laura Richis in the adaptation of Patrick S¸skind's novel Perfume, alongside Ben Whishaw. Director Tom Twyker raved about her "old soul in a young body".

The novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer was written by German author Patrick S¸skind and published in 1985. It is the tale of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a gifted 18th-century French perfumer, who murders 12 young girls to capture their scent for the perfect perfume. It became a hit in England in the mid-Nineties and sold 15 million copies and has been translated into 50 languages.

"I loved the book," Hurd-Wood says of Perfume. "I thought it was captivating, disturbing, fascinating." High praise when you consider that Hurd-Wood dropped English Literature after her GCSEs because "analysing every line of a text just made reading novels tedious for me". Does she agree that Ben Whishaw makes Grenouille - a cold-blooded murderer - too sympathetic? "Is he sympathetic?" she challenges me. "I'm not sure. In a way, it's amazing what Ben and Tom managed to pull off - making Grenouille despicable but accessible. Just watching Ben act was fantastic."

I think she rather took a fancy to Ben but she already has a "steady relationship" - at 16. The lucky, brave lad is 17-year-old half-Norwegian Mattis Vigs¯, whom she met through friends. It is difficult, she says, because he lives in Norway. "He's at college, he's a sprinter," she says, taking a stack of photographs from her bag. "I haven't seen him for two months. We've been going out for a year and five months and I'm going to see him in six days' time for New Year. It's really hard living in different countries, but I go to Norway a lot and we really love each other." She looks at a photo of Mattis then back at me, with that bomb-proof air of those who are loved and secure.

Hurd-Wood was the youngest person on set in Perfume; at 27, Whishaw was her closest in age. It must have been lonely. "Not really. There was always someone to talk to - although they might have been being nice to me but then gone off thinking I was an idiot." How did she feel about having luminous red hair? "Well, there was this thing about whether or not I was going to wear a wig or have my hair dyed. We said they could dye it on the condition it would all come out. But it didn't all come out, so I was ginger for quite a long time. Yup - I've heard all the ginger jokes."

Then she does something truly terrifying. She quotes Sartre at me, off the top of her head. "We have neither behind us nor before us in a luminous realm of values any means of justification or excuse," she says blithely in the course of a conversation we somehow end up having about God. Come again? "We are doing Sartre's Existentialism Is a Humanism in philosophy at college," she explains.

Her sixth-form college in Guildford is uppermost in her life. She probably could, if she wanted to, take Hollywood by storm - or at least mould herself into a London celebrity à la Peaches Geldof. But all that leaves her cold. "I'm not going to fall drunk out of London clubs," she says. "For a start, I'm allergic to alcohol." So, when she talks about her life, it is about her friends at college and her family, whom she lives with in Godalming in Surrey; when she talks about her future, it is about reading psychology at university and going on to work with "either people with autism or disorders like alcoholism or eating disorders". She likes films - Team America: World Police, The Breakfast Club and Battle Royale, a Japanese horror film; she likes books "horror books - like Stephen King" and she is a big fan of Green Wing, Black Books and South Park.

Acting seems, for her, to be ancillary to all this. "You can't make firm plans about [acting]. I'm not going to pull out of college to pursue some big celebrity lifestyle because if no films come along, then you're in trouble. If another perfect role comes along, then, sure, I'll do it, but it hasn't." Does she have any interest in being on TV or on stage? "No, definitely not," she says of treading the boards. "You have to be so ..." she waves her arms, "big."

This rejection of fame for fame's sake is typical of a girl who lacks the urgent neediness you find in most actors. She also loathes the pretentions associated with the profession. "I can't believe what they make people do on the drama course at college," she says witheringly. "Obscene stuff to get them to 'loosen up' and all that 'Be a tree, be a frog'. All a bit ridiculous."

Neither is she precious: she arrives at the interview with just her mother and turns down my offer of something to eat or drink. "I'm full. I had, like, four Oatibix before I came out," she says.

It is a damned shame Hurd-Wood isn't gunning for the big time: Lord knows, Hollywood could do with a few more girls like her.

Perfume phenomenon

Patrick Suskind, 57, who called his novel "awful" and "absurd", withdrew from public life years ago. He has only ever given one interview, shortly after Perfume was published. He had no involvement in the film - he sold the rights to the German producer Bernd Eichinger (The Cement Garden, The Name of the Rose) for £7 million.

Eichinger bought the rights in 2000 but it took six years to bring the book to the big screen; it was considered an unfilmable story, given that most of it consists of descriptions of smell and Grenouille's internal monologue. Some of the world's finest directors wanted to make the film of the book: Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and Amadeus mastermind Milos Forman had all expressed interest; Ridley Scott was attached to the project for some years and most recently Tim Burton was mooted to be involved.

But it fell to the relatively unknown German director Tom Tykwer to succeed where the big guns had failed. Tywker (Run, Lola, Run) got round the descriptive problems by relying on photography saturated with colour - the bright purple of the lavender fields, vibrant red of Laura Richis's hair and brilliant yellow of flower petals are substitutes for intense smells; there is also the narrator, John Hurt, who stitches a narrative together for the audience while Ben Whishaw, playing Grenouille, has only a handful of lines and must gather together the character of Grenouille for the most part in silence. EW