Evan Rachel Wood - interview

Playing troubled teens may have paved the way for Evan Rachel Wood's slow-burn rise to fame but in her latest film, she is every inch a woman. What's more, she's pulled off her most accomplished role to date surrounded by men.

In The Ides of March, Wood plays twentysomething intern Molly Stearns, who is caught in a dark and deadly political game before a presidential primary contest. Ryan Gosling co-stars as her bright, idealistic colleague, Stephen Meyers. The film's director, George Clooney, plays the Clinton-esque presidential hopeful, Governor Mike Morris.

The day before I meet Wood to discuss this breakout role - ''the first time people will really see me as a young woman'' - she was at Clooney's house, taking him on at his most cherished game: basketball. ''I am a black belt in taekwondo,'' she explains, when I ask of her sporting prowess, ''I used to compete. We were at George's house in Lake Como and he has a basketball court. I teamed up and actually challenged him. They beat us - but it was close. I had game, I got it.''

At 24, Wood has come a long way from her once defining role in Catherine Hardwicke's acclaimed drama Thirteen. In the 2003 film, she starred as Tracy Freeland, a girl led into a dark world of sex and drugs. A Golden Globe nomination led to a string of independent films, culminating in a flurry of calls from big-time directors (including Robert Redford, Ron Howard, Darren Aronofsky, Julie Taymor and Todd Haynes). A casualty of child-star acclaim she is not.

When she appears for our interview during this year's Venice Film Festival - following The Ides of March's world premiere - she is confident, focused and happy. Gone are the long locks of old, with a fresh tomboy haircut neatly matched by a no-nonsense Dolce&Gabbana ensemble of black jacket with three-quarter-length pants and cream-coloured ruffle-collared blouse. Fashion, she says, is another focus of her new life.

''I was always, if anything, a bit snobby about fashion,'' she says. ''I didn't realise there was a real art to it, that it could be used to express yourself … Now I'm fascinated by it.''

The smart, savvy figure Wood cuts these days stands in stark contrast to the one once branded as a ''home wrecker'' when her former partner, rocker Marilyn Manson, left his wife Dita von Teese for Wood, 18 years his junior. The union came to a ''natural'' end last year, according to Wood, and although she won't go into details about her love life today - despite being photographed with former child-star flame Jamie Bell - she insists she's never felt better.

Her newfound confidence is partly due to her ''coming out'' earlier this year, to Britain's Esquire magazine - where she confessed to being bisexual - and partly due to an ever-bolder presence on screen. Aside from her impressive turn in Clooney's The Ides of March, Wood famously bares all in Todd Haynes's epic mini-series Mildred Pierce.

''I was born an actor,'' the homeschooled North Carolina native says of her upbringing, which shifted to California from the age of nine, after her theatre and drama-focused parents divorced. ''The second I could talk, I was singing and reciting and performing. I like entertaining. It's a weird meditative thing for me.''

For someone now at ease with herself - tellingly, she's also reconnected with her father, after starring in 2008's The Wrestler with Mickey Rourke - and with all this grown-up talk aside, it's refreshing to see a natural girlish charm slip out. Yes, she believes Gosling to be the James Dean of his generation; she admits that hanging out in Clooney's house was ''unreal''; and she still can't quite believe she's at the Venice Film Festival with her director and mentor close by.

In fact, a dare from the infamously prankster-loving Clooney was just the ticket for Wood to display her newfound confidence. In this case, that meant jumping in a pool, fully dressed in designer threads.

''George had promised me, since filming, that after we premiered the film we'd jump in the pool in our suits and dresses,'' she says, revealing that she entertained guests with rousing renditions of Janis Joplin and Tina Turner numbers at the after party. ''Everyone chickened out. And I thought, 'No, I'm doing it'. I thought, 'You guys are missing out, this is amazing'. I was floating in the middle of a pool in Venice, staring up at the stars. It was magical.''