Rachel Hurd-Wood: a modern gothic starlet

Rachel Hurd-Wood is a knockout. Tall and slim, with proper curves, a halo of strawberry blonde curls, creamy skin, huge periwinkle blue eyes and a neat tip-tilted nose, she's a perfect English rose. No wonder she's well on her way to proving herself the next Great British Film Talent.

But behind her angelic looks, the 19-year-old reveals a dark side: no romcoms for her; Rachel's favourite films are twisted - Pan's Labyrinth, The Orphanage, Carrie. Jeff Buckley is her musician of choice, and forget Sleeping Beauty, her best-loved fairy tale is called The Stringla Princess, 'about this girl who cuts and kills horses and stuff and then she cuts all the limbs off her family and her brother runs away and she eats him,' she explains with a shrug.

Other than her breakthrough role, aged 12, as Wendy in PJ Hogan's blockbuster version of Peter Pan, she has always chosen to play tormented ingénues.

In An American Haunting in 2005 she took on two characters, the victims of violent hauntings (in a neat twist, Carrie star Sissy Spacek played her mother); in Perfume: the Story of a Murderer, the 2006 adaptation of Patrick Süskind's bestselling novel, she was stalked by a murderous Ben Whishaw, obsessed by her smell; in Solomon Kane, a comic-book adaptation set in 17th-century England, out later this year, she stars alongside James Purefoy and Pete Postlethwaite as a Puritan girl enslaved by demons from hell; and in the film she is here to promote, Dorian Gray, she is driven to suicide by her fiancé, the heartless hedonist Gray, played by Ben Barnes (Narnia's Prince Caspian).

They can't be easy roles to play, and she manages to bring vitality and feistiness to her performances that ensure no character of hers is ever simply a victim. 'I'm not dark, I'm not,' Rachel insists, a picture of wide-eyed innocence.

'The main thing I consider in accepting a role is less the tone of the movie and more whether I think it's a good film, whether I like the character and whether I think I could do it. I don't think, "Oh, I've done X amount of dark films." '

She likes lighter things, too, she goes on, like dolphins (she wanted to be a marine biologist as a child, until she found out you needed to be good at science) and Beyoncé and drawing. In the end, I put the dark side down to insouciance; it's not so much that she's obsessed by the darker side of life as that she isn't fazed by it.

(Left) Rachel wears one-shoulder dress with tie belt, £685, Moschino at Harvey Nichols (020 7235 5000)

Maybe it is for this that directors have been drawn to her for tricky roles, rather than the other way round. As Dorian Gray director Oliver Parker says: 'Rachel has a genuine openness as an actress and a person. There is real strength in her innocence.' Perfume director Tom Tykwer called her 'an old soul in a young body'.

It's a good description. Rachel is a curious mixture of teenager - upbeat and chatty, her conversation enthusiastic and filled with superlatives - and pragmatic movie-set oldtimer. She takes a deep breath when I ask if filming scary scenes is ever actually scary, eyeing me with a mixture of pity and longsuffering goodwill over her bowl of quinoa salad. 'Not really. You're acting, aren't you? Pretending to be scared.' She pauses, allowing time for this information sink in, then decides to throw a bone in kindness, 'Well, sometimes they do stuff to make you jump; to get a reaction.'