Rock star: Erin Wasson

She drinks, she smokes, she swears, she doesn’t exercise, she has several tattoos... forget saving furry animals and making poverty history, Erin Wasson is the ultimate anti-supermodel.

We are in her hotel room on the Croisette during the Cannes Film Festival. Outside, Cannes-demonium (her phrase) is in full swing; inside she’s dashing about, fixing me a drink. Her footwear for the next 72 hours of smiling for photographers and hobnobbing with Hollywood’s finest is neatly lined up along one wall, a vertiginous selection of designer spikes. I’m amazed to discover that she’s already found time to see Amour, an uncompromising drama about love and dementia. While she’s in town she’s desperate to meet director and juror Alexander Payne, whose movie The Descendants is set in Hawaii — other than her native Texas, her favourite place in the world, and where you’ll find her holidaying, barefoot and make-up-free.

Models can make frustrating interviewees, unwilling to take a stand on anything. But Erin, a 5ft 10in Amazon (her legs are endless, encased in a pair of stripey black and silver skinny Balmain trousers), is full of opinions. Her subtle Southern drawl reminds me of Julia Roberts, as do her slanting green eyes.

Her modelling career started at 15, when her father entered pictures of her in a Dallas modelling contest and she won. She hit the big time in 2002 when Mario Testino requested her for a D&G campaign, and she won a global contract with Maybelline. Now 30, and having worked with everyone from Peter Lindbergh to Karl Lagerfeld (she fronted the advertisements for his collaboration with H&M), she can pick and choose her jobs and has the freedom to broaden her horizons. She is a muse for Alexander Wang, as well as walking in his shows she has styled them; she has her own jewellery line, Low Luv, and has designed a capsule collection for Zadig & Voltaire. Two years ago she made her film debut as a Chateau Marmont party girl in Sofia Coppola’s film Somewhere and will star alongside Rufus Sewell and Dominic Cooper in the forthcoming off-beat vampire movie Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, to be released later this month.

‘Walking on to a movie set was the most daunting thing I’ve ever done,’ she says. ‘All I want in my life is to be challenged, to be provoked. I want to keep a fire under my ass for as long as possible.

‘I never understood how I ended up in fashion in the first place,’ she continues. ‘I’d walk into a room and in two seconds my entire persona was being judged. I’d never even get a chance to open my mouth. It was hard to digest in the beginning that the job wasn’t about what I had to say or who I was,’ she adds, leaning languorously back in her chair. Designing and acting, it seems, are better suited to her. ‘I keep joking that I wanna be a professional member of the Dead Poets Society,’ she laughs. ‘I love that whole idea: “Oh captain, my captain... let’s suck the marrow out of life!” ’

Of the recent Vogue initiative that states that no Vogue title will use models who are underage (no one younger than 16) or appear to have an eating disorder, she says: ‘Anyone with a voice should use it. Editors are the ones who greenlight who’s in the magazines and what kind of image they portray. If anybody wants to stand up for anything, then I think it’s wonderful.’ She points out that when she first started modelling she wouldn’t have passed these new regulations: ‘When I was 15, I was so painfully thin that I wouldn’t have made the mark. I wouldn’t have passed that whole situation, I was naturally that thin.’

Happily, at that stage, Erin had her mother on hand to support her. A ‘strong, Southern woman’, all too aware of the dangers of a beautiful young girl travelling the world alone, she was leaving nothing to chance. ‘I come from a very strong, rooted family in Texas,’ says Erin. ‘In the beginning my mother would travel with me and come to jobs with me. She was very much a part of the process. My agencies knew that nothing was going to get by Mama Wasson.’ Not everyone’s so lucky, she admits. ‘It’s very easy to look to someone in the fashion industry and ask for their opinion and they’ll tell you what you want to hear,’ she says. ‘But look to your friend or your mother and they’re going to tell you exactly what the f*** is up...’

Her idea of a break now is to head back home to Texas to see her family and old friends. She’s excited about her sister’s new baby and is determined not to let his first years go by without him getting to know her. She imparts some more Mama Wasson wisdom on the subject: ‘My mother always says, “Don’t spend your life making a living and forget to live your life.” Because it’s very easy to follow the carrot.’

That said, navigating a personal life when you live at a supermodel pace is tricky. Her free time is a ‘highly orchestrated art form’, she jokes (in Cannes, where she’s a semi-official ambassador for the festival sponsor Chopard, she’s brought a film-buff buddy along for the ride). She was briefly married to an artist but concedes that with her work, successful relationships are ‘difficult’. ‘It takes a very confident man to understand the craziness of this world and to know that you’re not going to be around that much.’