Imogen Poots on ripping up the Hollywood rulebook

Today she is promoting the aforementioned Vivarium, directed by Lorcan Finnegan. She and frequent collaborator Jesse Eisenberg accompany an estate agent to a suburban housing development that becomes nightmarishly impossible to leave and presents them with ‘inconveniences’, such as a super-creepy child to ‘raise to be released’. The film, in which Poots has more screen time than anyone else, deserves to find a wide audience. She likes stories like this — which has shades of the iconic domestic horror Rosemary’s Baby — the ones that examine people’s endurance or moral compass. Vivarium has been doing the rounds at festivals for a while, or as Poots says of a typical indie film, ‘it passes through many clammy palms through the decades’.

At the age of 14, Poots went from one Hammersmith private school to another, Latymer Upper, at which actors such as Hugh Grant and Lily Cole also studied. How did this privilege shape her? ‘I think, 100 per cent, no denying it, I had a really good f***ing education going to those schools,’ she says. ‘I think that, had I wanted to go on to university, I would have been helped out with certain criteria that would give me a leg up.’ At school she was in her own head a lot, as she says she is now, and often went mid-lesson to a toilet cubicle for a long think. If she decides to have children, will she send them to private school? Does she object to the principle? She gracefully dodges the question but says that some of the most well-adjusted and talented people she has ever met went to state school and that anything as old as private schooling is worth ‘re-examining’.

Poots also feels this way about the expectations heaped on people, and women especially. Vivarium casts a horrifically off-kilter eye on the checklist of life markers that is thrown at people in their 30s: meet someone, buy a house, settle down, have a child, ad infinitum. I ask if it’s rude to inquire whether she wants to have children at some point (her character grows increasingly protective of the ‘mutant child’ who has been bestowed upon them from Eisenberg’s character, who wants to kill him). ‘Rebecca Solnit said this very well, I think she was talking about Virginia Woolf when she said it: “Just because a question can be asked, it doesn’t mean that it should be asked or that you’re obliged to answer it.”’ This is a true Pootsian response: she is wonderfully erudite, peppering the conversation with literary references. But she does grant me an answer: ‘We are supposed to follow through a certain pattern with our lives. And it seems very unorthodox and unnerving if somebody veers off that path.’

Regarding her own ‘white picket-fence notion of how life could turn out’, she says: ‘It would be an absolute dream of mine to have children.’ But she doesn’t know. It’s tricky being a parent when your job might require you to travel to Canada for eight months, though she has seen other actors manage it. ‘It’s such an unknowable thing. And also, the more and more you learn about the world, you realise it’s not necessarily an easy thing and it’s not necessarily an option for some people.’

Like a long-distance relationship, if you want to make something work, Poots thinks, you can. She lives in both London and New York at the moment (‘I’m living here, I’m living there’) and that hasn’t stopped her staying together with Norton. ‘It’s all I’ve ever known,’ she says. ‘I’ve never known something to fall apart because of distance.’ The two of them are ‘such different people’, she says: he, logical and rational, she, a more typical actor living life with no blueprint.

Perhaps long-distance isn’t the challenge that it used to be because we are all available at the jab of a button. But Poots misses how it used to be: the posting of letters, the uncertain days of waiting for word from a lover. ‘All of that’s gone. So romance in and of itself has now shifted. I think that it’s sad that we’ve lost that, in a way.’

This chimes with her endearingly old-fashioned stance on technology. She’s a ‘curmudgeon’, she says. So she’s not on social media. Not publicly, anyway, she admits. Does she lurk? ‘I’m a lurker,’ she laughs. ‘I’m not a fan because I’m seeing what it’s doing to the generation below me, and that’s really sad with mental health. I think it’s a really slippery slope.’ Her reasons for not being online seem perfectly healthy: she knows what and whom she values in her private life so she’s unsure what a public social media account would achieve. ‘It’s intriguing to me but I also wonder, can you ever be authentic? Or is that not the point? Perhaps the point is to sell something.’

Social media was, as she says, instrumental in the seismic shift that took place when women in the film industry spoke out about the sexual abuse perpetrated by Harvey Weinstein, who has just been convicted of sexual assault and rape. ‘Obviously he’s a despicable human for his actions and forgivably is being depicted as a monster,’ she says, not holding back. But there is ‘a deep, dark, central problem’ at the heart of the business, Poots adds, which puts young women and men at risk by normalising moving meetings from restaurants to hotel rooms. ‘I couldn’t say what I would have done as an 18-year-old. I think now, apart from anything else, I could say, yes I’ve got the physical power but I don’t know about the emotional power.’

On the subject of the media’s depiction of Weinstein, Poots feels that ‘there are just as many very attractive men who have done bad things, too,’ although she has thankfully not experienced this. ‘There are plenty of other gorgeous humans who will not be portrayed in the same light [as Weinstein].’

The Weinstein saga opened a Pandora’s box, she says. But things are improving. One evolution is the employment of intimacy co-ordinators for sex scenes. ‘I think it’s great for people coming up through the industry to have that,’ she says. When Poots had one for the HBO series I Know This Much Is True, she called the co-ordinator and said they should talk about merkins (the pubic wigs used to protect an actor’s modesty). ‘And she was like, “I mean, do you want one?” I was like, “Oh, no, not really. I just thought I should broach that subject.”’ She went merkin-less in the end.

Life for Poots may be a little busy and stressful right now, but this is exactly how she likes it. This certainly explains her bulging filmography. ‘I find work to be my happy place, in a way. Because it’s all I’ve ever known: packing up a bag and moving on. That restlessness that’s inherent in you is very addictive. And I suppose now I’m supposed to slow down and set up a farm or something. But I’m not ready to do that. I want to keep exploring the world.’

‘Vivarium’ is in cinemas from 27 Mar