Some Hollywood actors don’t like it when the paparazzi get pictures of them snogging a new boyfriend or going down the shops with no make-up. The Hollywood movie star Chloe Moretz, who is currently sitting in a Hollywood hotel room, curled up in a window seat in a navy suit jacket, jeans and heels, is just a bit sick of being papped holding her toy rabbit.
She’s had him half her life (since she was 7; she’s 14 now) “and he used to be cream but now he’s brown and my Mom wants to wash him. But I won’t let her because I’m afraid he’ll lose his smell. I still sleep with him and he goes everywhere with me — not in the hold, I carry him right on to the plane, and they take those pictures in airports. But I have a lot of other stuffed animals in my bedroom too. Ballerina bears, Harrods bears, everything! And then I have a painting of Audrey Hepburn and a 3-D poster from Kick-Ass on the wall.”
Ah, Kick-Ass, the movie that really explains why somebody young enough to sniff her teddies is old enough to be a star. In that comic-book-made-movie, she played, as she puts it, “this 11-year-old girl running around chopping people’s heads off. I mean, it’s pretty dark! Without the comedy, you’d be pretty freaked out. You’d be like, wait a second, you’re a little creepy. But — she only does it to bad people. Anyway, it’s a movie, it’s not me.”
In any case, she made that back when she was a (brilliant) child, and now she’s a (brilliant) adolescent, who has just learnt to walk in heels “like, on a carpet carpet.” (I think this means as opposed to a red carpet.) She has got over her Bieber fever — “Well, Justin’s with Selena now”, she says, rolling her eyes — and has persuaded one of her four older brothers to give her his iPad, even though her parents sometimes punish her by taking her electronics away.
But we’re here today to discuss Let Me In, a vampire movie about to be released on DVD, which stars Moretz as a 300-year-old bloodsucking child. Her elder brother, Trevor, who is in his twenties, is sitting with her, functioning as a chaperone, manager and her acting coach. They work together almost constantly. I wonder how to tell them I didn’t get to the end of the DVD, in which Chloe plays a lonely little girl called Abby who moves with her father to a dimly-lit small town, where they hide in the shadows, killing people. I was too frightened. Did she find it as scary to make as I did to watch? Did I mention that I am 34?
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“No!” she says, her face constantly animated. “We make fun of the scenes, like,” she does a silly ghostly voice, “I drink bloooood — to surviiive. Cut your wrists, ptchaaa.” (She mimes bloodletting.) “It was fun, it was a good shoot, a lot of inside jokes. I didn’t take it home with me and get nightmares, no. It’s not scary when you’ve got the director in front of you, going ‘Yessss’.”
Moretz is entertaining company. When asked how she prepared to play Abby, she says: “Well, yeah, how do you research a vampire? You can’t find somebody who’s 300 years old and drinks blood and go, ‘So how’s that working out for you?’ ” In the end she used her favourite technique of writing a journal as the character, imagining her way into that person’s life. She also thought about kids she had met who were “not weird, but just — off. Different from usual. Just off.”
But she is so on, so bright and shiny and talking like a 20-year-old, and yet she makes all these dark movies. “I have so many different characters in my mind, I am so many people. So I just pool from each side of me,” she explains. “And it’s a lot more fun to play a character who has a messed-up life.”
Moretz was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the youngest of five children in a Southern family raised to show the utmost respect to their elders and to their decorum. “In Kick-Ass I said the c-word but my parents would kill me if I cussed like that in real life,” she says.
They moved to Los Angeles some years later, partly so Moretz could pursue her Hollywood ambitions (she has now made more than 20 movies), but her father’s work as a plastic surgeon also flourished in the movie industry. “Yes, he has some clients who are actors,” she says discreetly. Then she bursts out “Oh but it freaks me out! I mean I’m sure I’ll probably have something done one day, but, I’m scared of the syringe. I’m even dreading the day I turn 16 and have to get my shots done.” She is very excited that Britney Spears is back in the charts. “Like, I’m freaking out.” Did you always like her? “Yeah, I mean I was born in 1997, which was kind of like the start of her heyday, so I can’t remember that much ’cos I was a baby.” Gulp — remember when it was Britney who was the child star?
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Since she has been privately tutored for some years, I ask her if going to school is just a distant memory. “No,” she says, then pauses. “Oh, you mean like, school school? You mean, like getting dropped off there in the morning?”
Her brother smiles drolly. “You know, Chloe, that whole normal thing?”
“Well, I think I stopped going to regular school when I was — mmm — third grade? So I would have been about — 11?”
“You went until fourth grade.”
“I did a semester.”
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“It was a Beverly Hills public school and you were missing so much that you were politely asked to attend or leave.”
“That’s right. I left.”
She likes history and literature and is currently studying the feminist pioneer Susan Anthony and the lead-up to the American Civil War. She has had the same tutor for eight years. “She knows how my brain works. And if I’m tired, what to do to wake me up.”
That tutor accompanied her to the making of Hugo Cabret, Martin Scorcese’s first 3-D movie, set in a 1920s train station in Paris but filmed largely at Shepperton Studios, London and out in December. She reels off the names of her co-stars “Sir Ben Kingsley, Sir Christopher Lee, Jude Law, Sacha Baron Cohen, Emily Mortimer ... I was the only American on it! Almost all of my scenes were with Sir Ben, he’s so cool, such a cool guy. Very theatrical. He knows what to do when he gets in front of a camera. He knows how to take the screen over. But Sir Christopher Lee and Marty [Scorcese] and Ben were like walking history books, they just spew knowledge. I was like, I feel so dumb around you!”
What’s Scorcese’s secret?
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“The relationship he makes with his cast. I was so nervous but from the minute I met him in the audtion he makes you feel at home, like he’s your uncle. He loves his actors and he loves what he does and you can see that. I had a delightful time and I’d work with him again in a heartbeat.”
Your brother and your mother (who now also works on project Chloe) are scheduling your 2011 around making five independent films and two bigger studio releases, including Hick, an adaptation of a novel about a rural teen who runs away to Las Vegas. What happens if you just don’t want to get out of bed? “But it’s fun! If you love acting. And there’s a moment when other actors recognise your work that really hits you. That’s what you strive for. Who cares about fame and all that? I’d rather be recognised for my work.”
Trevor says: “There are days when I have to make myself stop working for her. I’m reading a script for her or putting a cast list together at ten at night and I have to stop. And I am working on a couple of movie projects that don’t have her in them. But I love her work and I view her as one of the ultimate actresses of her generation, so it’s hard to find projects and not want to cast her.”
“When him and Mom get together, woah, calm down,” Moretz says. “We have this rule at Christmas: no talking about Dad’s business or our business. But then,” she adds, “we have nothing left to say.”
Let Me In is out on DVD and Blu-ray on Monday