I am twiddling my thumbs in a hotel corridor, waiting for my interview with Mia Wasikowska, the new Alice. I can hear her American publicists whispering about the obtuse intricacies of British etiquette. At the royal premiere for Alice in Wonderland, directed by Tim Burton in 3-D, Wasikowska would be meeting the Prince of Wales. The nattering minders are concerned about how the 20-year-old Australian actress should address His Royal Highness, and how she should curtsy.

Through Burton’s looking glass, royal etiquette wouldn’t much bother this new Alice. As reimagined by the director and his screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, Alice is now 19, on the cusp of womanhood, bold and feisty. She questions convention and the roles society wants to impose on her — such as her impending and unwelcome marriage to an aristocratic twit. She is on her second trip down the rabbit hole. Only dimly aware she has been here before, she re­discovers familiar friends and foes — now sumptuous CGI characters, voiced and portrayed by British actors, including Matt Lucas as both Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Stephen Fry as the lugubrious Cheshire Cat and Alan Rickman as the smoke-enveloped, enigmatic Caterpillar. Alice faces down Helena Bonham Carter’s hysterical Red Queen, befriends Johnny Depp’s tragic Mad Hatter, tames the fearsome Bandersnatch and eventually slays the terrifying Jabberwock.

Such a liberal reinterpretation will doubtless upset some Lewis Carroll purists, but Wasikowska says it freed her to discover her own Alice. “It was like finding the person inside or underneath the iconic Alice,” she says. “Now she’s an older Alice, who is experiencing what many teenagers are experiencing — a kind of awkwardness, discomfort in your skin and in your society or among your peers, a feeling of isolation.”

Wasikowska had read Carroll’s books when she was a child, and reread them as she prepared for the part. “My other encounter with Alice was the Czech director Jan Svankmajer’s version, a stop-motion animated film, which is incredible,” she adds, in such a mild Australian accent that you could mistake her for English. “When we were kids, my mum would pop it in the VCR player. We would be disturbed, and wouldn’t really understand it, but we couldn’t look away because it was too intriguing. So I had kept that feeling about Alice, a kind of haunting feeling.”

As you can probably tell from the way Wasikowska (pronounced Vah-she-kov-ska) talks, she is thoughtful and articulate. Burton says that as he and the producers sifted through scores of possible Alices, it was her mature intelligence that intrigued him. “I always like it when I sense people have that ‘old soul’ quality to them,” he says. “Because you’re witnessing this whole thing through her eyes, it needed somebody who can subtly portray that.” Whatever that quality really is, it comes in part from Wasikowska’s slightly unusual upbringing in Canberra, the capital of Australia, sometimes thought of as a bit of a cultural desert. Her mother is a photographer, originally from Poland, and she made sure that Mia, her older sister and younger brother were introduced to European and other cultural influences when they were young. That had a huge effect on Wasikowska and her siblings, who all work in the arts now.

As we chat, Wasikowska is perched on the edge of a couch in a large hotel suite overlooking the Hollywood Hills, which are, atypically, swathed in clouds. She is near the end of two days of nonstop interviews. She will soon have PTJS, she jokes — “Post Traumatic Junket Syndrome” — but she still manages to look lovely and sweet, and is earnestly attentive, with wide, inquisitive eyes, in a flouncy, dreamy white Marc Jacobs dress, trimmed in black, her blonde hair cropped close across her head. She says she has been taking photographs of hotel rooms like this, and other places on her travels, with an old Rolleiflex her mother gave her, a square- format film camera. She has also been taking shots on the sets of her films — not traditional on-set pictures, but the reverse, the actress looking back at the world around her.

“We have this incredible perspective as actors,” she says, “and I wanted to show what I am seeing when everybody is kind of staring at me — when there’s a black box in front of your face and a boom microphone above your head, and you’re thinking, ‘What am I doing?’ With photography, I have a creative outlet I can control. It’s separate from film. I can do it when I want. I don’t have to wait to get a role or start filming.”

Wasikowska trained as a ballet dancer until she was 15, when she became disillusioned. She decided to change direction and become an actor. “I’d danced for many years, and I loved it,” she says. “But when I was 14 or 15, I was doing 35 hours a week, and it became so much about physical perfection that it kind of beats you down and grates on your self-esteem. I loved performing, and I was watching all these amazing films, like Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue. What I liked most about them was that, unlike ballet, they were about imperfection and all the things we, as human beings, do wrong. I became really attracted to that, because it seemed to be much more about real life than ballet.”

After getting her start in the Australian medical drama series All Saints, Wasikowska came to Hollywood’s attention when she played Sophie, a troubled teenager, in the HBO series In Treatment, which shows, in half-hour episodes, a psychotherapist (Gabriel Byrne) holding weekly sessions with his patients. The accolades she received for her harrowing performance helped her to become the latest in what seems to be an inexhaustible supply of young Australian actresses to have conquered Hollywood. I ask her whether she or her parents were worried about her playing Sophie, a girl who had become hypersexual and sullenly suicidal after being raped by her gym teacher. Wasikowska was just 17 when she took on the role, which lasted through nine episodes.

“My parents have always been really supportive and protective, and if I had said ‘This worries me’, or ‘I don’t feel comfortable doing this’, they would immediately have told me not to do it,” she says. “But it’s so rare that you come across a teenage character that resembles something of what it’s like to be a teenager. Adolescence is so often portrayed in films as something that’s unachievable, something that makes you feel inadequate, that you’re not perfect enough. I’ve always found it hard to identify with characters like ‘the girlfriend’ or ‘the pretty, popular girl’ or ‘the cheerleader’.”

I wonder what drew her to Sophie. “I felt I really understood Sophie, and that she was very much like girls I have known. I felt this incredible protectiveness towards her, and that, for people who were like her, I needed to do her justice. After we’d finished, it was hard for me to let go of her — being in America, I didn’t really know anyone here, so she was like my friend, a friend I was able to help.”

Wasikowska got somewhat used to being in Hollywood when she was shooting In Treatment. Yet, like Alice, she says she still has to pinch herself to make sure she’s not dreaming when she’s on set with stars such as Depp, Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway, who plays the ethereal White Queen. Wasikowska met Depp while they were doing camera and costume tests in preproduction. “He is everything you’d expect him to be: nice and kind and just an incredible actor. He plays these crazy characters, but he gives them this humanity and heart, which is what he has done with the Hatter.

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