Killing It

Viewers of film and television are well-aware by now that you mess with Chloe Grace Moretz at your own risk. The 16-year-old actress of course has a fair few lighter roles on her alarmingly extensive resume – the precocious voice of reason in (500) Days Of Summer, an adventurous bookworm in Martin Scorsese's Hugo, Alec Baldwin's teenage nemesis on 30 Rock – but it's with somewhat darker, edgier roles in movies like Let Me In, the US remake of the acclaimed Swedish vampire story Let The Right One In, that she's made an even greater impression.

And maybe the biggest impression she's made on movie-goers to date is with her role as pint-sized badass vigilante Mindy Macready, aka the purple-clad Hit Girl, in Kick-Ass, the big-screen adaptation of Mark Millar's nasty, ultraviolent comic book. Trained in martial arts and maximum intimidation by her father and fellow costumed crimefighter Damon 'Big Daddy' Macready (Nicolas Cage), pre-teen Mindy had no qualms about laying waste to any lowlife in her path with guns, blades and a choice array of well-deployed profanity. (Her opening line to a gang of thugs – “Okay, you cunts, let's see what you can do now” – inspired more than a few shocked gasps and laughs.)

Three years on, Moretz is reprising her role as Mindy/Hit Girl in Kick-Ass 2, with her character facing a far more dangerous adversary than the city's criminal element. Enrolled in high school, she finds herself frenemies with a clique of mean girls who play just as dirty as the street scum she used to dispatch with such glee. But using her lethal skill-set to sort the situation is out of the question... right?

Well, let's not spoil anything in that regard. But fans of Hit Girl's homicidal antics in the first film, directed by Matthew Vaughn, will be pleased to know that a fair few wrongdoers meet a messy fate at the business end of Mindy's impressive arsenal in Kick-Ass 2, which sees writer-director Jeff Wadlow taking the reins. Moretz points out, however, that the character is a little torn at times as to whether she's creating carnage in the name of justice or simply because she gets a kick out of it.

“At the end of the first Kick-Ass, Mindy was orphaned,” she says. “And without her dad, she didn't know what she was doing – she was kind of lost. She never really had a childhood, and now she's still putting on this mask and this uniform, thinking that's what she wants to do. But I do think she really knows if she's a vigilante or a villain. If she's killing people for a cause or whether she's just having fun, you know? Her moral compass has gone a bit haywire.”

No fear of that happening to Moretz, who has strong family backing to help guide her career choices. “My mom would never allow me to do something she felt would harm me as a person or my career as a business,” she says. However, when the 11-year-old Moretz saw the action movie Wanted, she admits she raced home and told her mother she simply had to find a role similar to Angelina Jolie's hard-hitting, straight-shooting assassin.

“And I'm not kidding, a month later my agent came to us and said 'I've got this script, it's a very risky role,' and they gave me the whole spiel, all the pros and cons.” The script was Kick-Ass, the role was Hit Girl. “My mom read it and she fell in love with it. She told me it was one of the best characters she'd ever read, so I read it and I fell in love with it too, and I just chased after it until I got it. So I booked the film, knowing exactly what was in the script and exactly what they wanted to shoot, and we did it.”

Reprising the role was subsequently a no-brainer, and Moretz says “it was like coming home – it was super-fun to be back in the uniform.” Especially since starting work on Kick-Ass 2 came a mere two day after wrapping her previous job, playing the title role in Boys Don't Cry director Kimberley Peirce's new adaptation of Stephen King's classic horror novel, Carrie. Playing the victimised Carrie White, who eventually uses her latent telekinetic powers to wreak vengeance on her high school tormentors, was a marked contrast to portraying Hit Girl.

“It was kind of mind-boggling to be in this bloodied prom dress one day, beating up people in this purple superhero suit the next,” laughs Moretz. “They are the most polar opposite characters you could ever imagine!”

She's extremely excited about Carrie, which co-stars Julianne Moore and is due for release later this year, but admits she had a few misgivings before meeting with the studio backing the film. “Brian DePalma's version of Carrie is a beloved movie for me, so when it came up during this meeting how Kimberley was already attached and I was told about the work the screenwriter was doing on the script, I went 'Oh, so you're not making some gory, hacky cheesefest; you're making a real film',” she says.

“When I got the script and read it, I fell in love with who Carrie is. This is the perfect depiction of Stephen King's Carrie – she is here who she is in the book. It isn't a remake of DePalma's film; it's an adaptation of Stephen King's book. And I fought tooth and nail for this movie; I took four different meetings, did two auditions, and they all went for hours. I know that no one else could be Carrie like I could be Carrie. And when I was able to step on set and be her, it was my most fruitful experience as an actor.”

That certainty is a key aspect of Moretz's selection of roles. “If I look at something and I don't go 'I am going to be the best actor for this and I'm so invested in this, I don't think anyone else can do it', I won't do the film. I won't do it if I don't have that feeling, even if I think the script is amazing. You're living in the shoes of characters like Mindy and Carrie, and you have to be able to portray her in such a way that the audience doesn't feel like you're lying to them.”