Imogen Poots, Interview EsMagazine


By EsMagazine UK
April 07

Imogen Poots is only 17, and a young-looking 17 at that, but she already exudes the aura of a future somebody. Shy and quietly spoken, dresed in a naive ensemble of multicoloured stripey cardigan, purple scarf with glittery treads and neck-lace of carved wooden elephants, when she sidles into the venerable Nothing Hill institution that is Julie's windows table, and cappuccinos are brought with commendable speed.

Imogen is a fragile-looking 5ft 4in and very pretty in an elfin way, with wide blue eyes and wavy blonde hair. She is on the books of Select modelling agency and looks a natural for costume drama so it comes as a slight shock to learn that so far in her (admittedly short) film career, every single role she's won has been gritty, not to say controversial.

'It was scary beacause you walk round the set and everyone's covered in blood and gore, and wearing ragged clothing,' she says casually of her latest role in 28 Weeks Latern the sequel to Danny Boyle's horror film 28 Days Later. Imogen plays Tammy th 17 year old heroine (and daughter of Robert Carlyle's character) who is left alone in a zombie infested Canary Wharf with her 12 year old brother, played by the equally marvellously named Mackintosh Muggleton. "Probably the most horrific bit was when i was crawling through mounds of corpses in a Tube station ," she says in her precise little voice. It's was hideous to look at, I was having to gasp on to skulls and fall on to bodies, but, of course, they were all made of rubber."

This expιrience has not, Luckily, traumatised her 'even though legally she's too young even to see the film). In fact, she says she found the three month shoot exciting , filming in Shaftesbury Avenue at dawn on Sundays to ensure the streets were empty, and marking friends with her co-star, Australian actress Rose Byrne. Imogen's first screen role, at the age of 14, was playing a pregnant teenager in Casualty. "She'd been having unprotected sex and there were bad consequences," she says. "There was lots of throwing up cold chicken soup. It was great fun." Didn't her parents mind this rather louche story-line ? "Oh no," she says. "They're very laid-back about things like that."

That was flollwed the next year by an appearance in V for Vendetta , a big-budget film, also set in a dystopic future Britain and startin Natalie Portman, "I was looking back to her schooldays and about how her whole lesbian relationship began..."

Luckily for Imogen, she comes from a film-savvy background, otherwise one doubts whether her parents have been so sanguine about these colourful early experiences. Her father is the television producer and director Trevor Poots, who edited The Frost Programme for years and clearly has a good working relationship with Sir David, as he also produced Frost's programmes Inside Elton's World his 1997 interview with the Prince of Wales. Her housewife mother Fiona is an anthusistic amateur actress who shepherded her children to the theatre when they were growing up.

Imogen and her elder brother Alex, who is studying at Manchester University, were brought up in Chiswick. Imogen was sent to Queen's Gate school in South Kensington, were she insist (a touch implausibly) that she never had a nickname. Poots, which she says is an Irish name, has already been raising eyebrows in cyberspace, but Imogen likes it. "It's memorable, I guess," she says, laughing out loud when I ask if she hasn't considered changing it. "It's an icebreaker. When you tell peope, they always say, "Pardon?""

Imogen showed early talent for acting, was cast as Puck in the Queen's Gate version of a Midsummer Night's Dream, and, at 13, petitioned to be allowed to join YoungBlood, a youth theatre company that ran Saturday classes near her home. Almost immediately, it seems, her talent was spotted; at any rate, it was a year later that she won her Casualty role.

Her latest appearance is bound to draw further interest from the casting agents, but for the next few months, Imogen is resolutely refusing all offers, no matter how tempting.

"At the moment, I'm getting my head down to do my A Levels. No more distractions," she says firmly. 'It seems silly to have worked so long in school not to concentrate now" (Especially as she's already taken three and half months off this year in order to crawl over bleeding corpses.)

In a couple of months, she sits three A Levels in history of art, English and art, which she is taking at Latymer Upper School. After that, she intends to take a year out, and then go to university. She has no desire to try for a drama school.

"I do really admire Natalie Portman," she says of her one-time co-star, "because she's a brillant actress, but also she did the university thing and combined it with acting. Acting is such a fickle profession: getting one job doesn't necessarily procure you anything, so it's important to have somthingto fall back on." A very sensible approach from the level-headed Miss Poots, but I'm quite sure it's unnecessary.LS 28 Weeks Later is out on 11 May.

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