The performer played Lucy Pevensie in the Chronicles of Narnia movies, which first came out when she was just eight-years-old.
Now, 13 years after she was first seen in the franchise, she’s starring in Angry, a play by Philip Ridley at London’s Southwark Playhouse.
Speaking to What’s On Stage, she said: “Narnia gave me everything I have now. At the time I really felt like I’d jumped in at the deep end – on my first day I had to be told not to look in the camera.
“But travelling the world and meeting all those people gave me the hope that I could carry on with acting as a career.”
She added: “I went on and had a normal school life with some smaller film projects on the side. I felt that I really couldn’t do theatre at school as it’d mean putting my head above the parapet and there were a lot of issues with kids picking on me.
“In my final year we did a Queen musical, and I ended up playing the lead, which was amazing, but there were parents who ended up writing to the school and complaining because I hadn’t previously contributed to school drama.”
She’s put in a lot of hard work since: she graduated from Cambridge and has earned her stripes in a low-key theatrical production at the Edinburgh Fringe and directed her own short films.
In Angry, she plays alongside Tyrone Huntley, with the pair of them delivering five monologues between them.
What gives the piece its edge is that they will alternate who does what monologue every night.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe also starred William Moseley, Anna Popplewell and Skandar Keynes as the Pevensie children.
The adult cast boasted Tilda Swinton, James McAvoy and Liam Neeson.