True Grit star Hailee Steinfeld: ‘I’m still a beginner’

The last time we saw Hailee Steinfeld, she had fallen down a hole and was being menaced by rattlesnakes.

By that climactic point in the Coen Brothers’ 2010 version of True Grit, she had so stolen the show as a debutante actor in the daunting company of Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin that you had no doubt she would face down the ordeal.

Steinfeld had been chosen for the role of the pigtailed Mattie Ross, heroine of the Charles Portis novel, from an open audition of 150,000 girls in her native California.

The idea of a star being born has rarely had as much credence: she went along as a 13-year-old with hardly any acting experience, left on the list of youngest ever Oscar nominees beside the likes of Tatum O’Neal and Jodie Foster, and with critics falling over themselves to describe her “awesome talent”. “The girl,” said one, “now has the film world wrapped around her little finger.”

Nearly three years on and Steinfeld is set to make good on those prophecies. She took 12 months off after True Grit to attend award ceremonies, keep up with schoolwork, catch her breath (“The only words I think I spoke all that year,” she says, “were: ‘Thank you so much I had so much fun.’”)

Since then she has worked on seven films with a roster of co-stars that includes Keira Knightley, Kristen Wiig, Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank and Kevin Costner.

She was in London this month for the launch of the first two of those films: Julian Fellowes’s take on Romeo and Juliet in which she falls head over heels with Douglas Booth, and Ender’s Game, the adaptation of the cult science-fiction book, in which she is mostly in zero gravity with fellow prodigy Asa Butterfield (of Hugo fame) and Harrison Ford.

When we meet, she is not long off the plane. Her mother, travelling with her, is looking a little weary from the enforced jet-setting; but Steinfeld herself is bright-eyed and, like any 16-year-old in London, anxious to check out “the big Topshop”.

Steinfeld is, in person, both older and younger than she appeared in True Grit. It is hard to imagine anyone more determined or wise beyond her years than her beetle-browed Mattie Ross, so you don’t expect her to still be a smiley teenager. But she is, determinedly, as she is keen to stress, having fun.

We talk about the particular fun of Ender’s Game, in which a hit squad of young Xbox addicts is recruited to save the world from alien invasion, and there is a good deal of floating upside down in spacesuits, firing laser guns.

It required a very different skill set from those she needed in her first film. There was a military bootcamp to begin with, on set in New Orleans, where they “learned to march and did a lot of core body work”. (Steinfeld’s father is a fitness trainer, her brother a Nascar driver, so you guess that came quite easily.) And then she had to learn to act in space. “The hard thing,” she says, “was trying to do all your character work while hanging from a wire, and unable to bend at the waist.”

She went to the set straight from Italy where she had been filming Romeo and Juliet for three and a half months, which was a more emotionally challenging experience. “Ender’s Game was always something I could look forward to,” she says. “It was very amusing in that there was always someone spinning out of control 15ft up in the air.”

After True Grit Steinfeld was not short of offers and mostly let her team “my agents and my family” decide what she would do next. They seem to have gone for variety as much as anything, but as she gets older she’d like to “try to weigh in a bit more myself”.

It doesn’t seem likely she will do a Miley Cyrus though, she’s far too calm. She has no interest in the career trajectory of other child stars, though actors she has worked with “have incredible stories about starting young, giving up, going back to it. You know there is going to be a lot of struggle and conflict along the way. I’m ready for that.”

She is still getting used to the idea of seeing herself on screen. I wonder, what did she make of her larger-than-life self in True Grit?

“My mum and dad and older brother and a few people had a private screening on the Paramount lot,” she recalls. “I sat in front of everyone, in a row on my own and I didn’t turn around until the very end of the credits. I was scared to in a way. It was the first time I had seen it. I knew they would tell me it was good no matter what. But anyway, I turned around eventually and looked at my parents and we all just got really, really emotional. The Paramount people said they wished they had this response to all their screenings. But it was so overwhelming for me. The way it translates on screen is so different to how you imagine.”

She has not been short of famous co-stars in her short career, but does she feel completely at home in the company of Harrison Ford and the rest now?

“Well, you have so many pinch-me moments you have to stop pinching,” she says. “I still consider myself very much a beginner; maybe that never changes.” On Ender’s Game she was able to swap stories with Butterfield whose career has had a similar charmed trajectory. “People keep telling us it is so rare to have what we have had in out first films, that you can wait for ever for it. But we seem to be lucky enough to have it every time so far.”