Chloe Moretz is an actress who's just turned 13. You might recognise her from her role in last year's indie romance, (500) Days of Summer or as Darby, a little girl invented for the animated US version of Winnie the Pooh. Unsurprisingly, this is the only thing resembling a controversy in Moretz's so far short career: Pooh purists were horrified.
A great many more people might blanch at Moretz's latest role: that of Mindy Macready, aka Hit-Girl, an 11 year-old assassin with a salty turn of phrase and a gleeful willingness to part man from limb. Miles Millar, the creator of Kick-Ass, says he wrote Hit-Girl as "John Rambo meets Polly Pocket".
So how is Moretz coping with the furore? "It's a controversial role. Did it make me nervous? Like I said, it was a role. I never really thought about the aftermath of it. And I knew that everything I was saying, if I ever said anything like it in real life, I would be grounded forever, literally forever."
But despite the adult nature of the role, Moretz seems much like any other American 13 year-old. What's more, Moretz, a self-described "tomboy girlie girl", had always dreamed of playing a character like Angelina Jolie's glamorous assassin in Wanted.
Little girls are rarely the leads in action movies, but her mother, who reads every script that comes to Moretz, took note. "She was like, ‘Chloe, it's exactly what you wanted,'" Moretz says. "I read it and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to be Hit-Girl!'"
Months of physical training followed. When she wasn't learning stunt moves, Moretz was being shouted at by ex-Marines. "They were all like: ‘Get down and give me 20,' seriously!" she says. "I did about 50 pull-ups and 1,000 crunches a day. Crazy."
Moretz is now an adept handler of stun and smoke grenades, and can take apart and reassemble a gun with the well-oiled familiarity of a professional soldier. She's still breathlessly excited about her new, singularly unlikely skills. "It's like Halloween every day," she says. "Imagine that. Doing something totally different from who I am, every day."
For now, Moretz is excited about the future. She says she's looking forward to working with Martin Scorsese on The Invention of Hugo Cabret, but before that there's a child-friendly comedy, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and Let Me In, a remake of a pitch black Swedish vampire film. One day she hopes to go to college like Natalie Portman, whom she idolises. And if things don't work out with film, she'll train to be a pilot.
"You go up for hundreds, thousands of roles," she says sagely, "and you get told no, no, no, so many times. You have to have a tough skin otherwise you'd get beaten down. But I'm not. I love getting told no, coz then I fight even more."
