Evan Rachel Wood: 'I didn't want to fizzle out'

When George Clooney rings and asks you to be in his film, you don't say no, says Evan Rachel Wood. Which explains why the actors in The Ides of March fit so perfectly into each role, as if Clooney went about his casting in the way he might tackle a jigsaw. Wood says she wasn't sure where he spotted her, but she thinks it was in Across the Universe, Julie Taymor's musical film based around Beatles songs. "He's kind of an Across the Universe geek," she says.

She spends the next 10 minutes enthusing about her co-stars, mainly Clooney and Ryan Gosling, who plays an adviser to Clooney's Democrat governor with ambitions on the White House – "not only is he really cool, charming, good-looking; on top of that he's super talented. It's too much."

The Ides of March reveals the dark back-room scheming that goes on so the politician out front gets to keep his hands clean; Wood plays Molly, an intern who threatens to derail Clooney's political ambition.

"It's great to be able to play a young woman who is mature and sure of herself and is witty and sexy. It's really hard to find really well-written women. There are only two female characters in the movie [the other is Marisa Tomei as a spiky New York Times journalist], but they're tough and can hold their own."

I tell her I like the way Molly is sexually confident and refreshingly unapologetic about it. Wood nods. "She is straightforward. But that's what's kind of cool, she's one of the few honest people in the movie and she suffers the most, that's the tragedy." She didn't hang around with interns in Washington to research the part: "I hang out in Hollywood: that's pretty political."

For the last few years, Wood has almost had the monopoly on emotional, turbulent daughters – from her self-destructive teen in Thirteen, to Mickey Rourke's estranged daughter in The Wrestler and Kate Winslet's malign daughter in the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce. This may be her first grown-up role. "Yes, I feel this is a new side of me and I feel it's going to open some new doors."

Wood sits cross-legged, with a pair of the highest heels I've ever seen tucked under her. She is wearing a beautiful black trouser suit and a cream silk shirt buttoned, hefty eye makeup and her short hair swept back in a gentle wave, like a mini Marlene Dietrich. I tell her I love her look and she beams. "I love it, I've got to say," she says. "I was getting really envious of guys being able to wear suits and run their fingers through their hair and that was all they had to do. I thought, screw it, I'm going to do that. I don't know how I'm ever going to go back now."

While many of her characters have been very aware of their sexual power, she has never played the pure lust object and fallen victim to Hollywood's appetite for young, pretty women who get forgotten as soon as the next one comes along. It's one of the reasons she says she doesn't feel under the same pressure other young women in her industry face. "I think people know by now that I'm going to do what I'm going to do and I'm going to be me. But I see it, definitely.

Perhaps it's because she was once engaged to the goth rocker Marilyn Manson, or because she came out as bisexual earlier this year, or because she doesn't seem to have had her personality removed by film studio bosses that she seems more interesting than most Hollywood actors her age.

"There's a lot more pressure on women to look a certain way, to be skinny, to be this and that. I think that's one of the reasons why I chopped all my hair off. I was just like, 'No, I'm not doing this.'"

She says she isn't conscious of her weight, for instance, because "you'll drive yourself crazy because you're never going to be the perfect weight, you're never going to be the perfect anything."

Earlier this year, Wood came out as bisexual in a curious interview in which she kept dropping hints and appeared keen to be asked, which led to accusations it was a publicity stunt – not least because she announced it in a men's magazine to promote a film, accompanied by pictures of her in underwear. She says she told her family a couple of years ago but wanted to come out because "it's a big part of who I am and growing up when I was feeling unsure about myself and my feelings, I would hear about actresses I looked up to being very open about it. So if I can return the favour and somebody who is freaking out and confused about themselves can hear: 'You're not the only one and this is totally normal and fine and there's nothing to be ashamed about' then right on."

Wood was always going to be an actor. Her father ran the local theatre in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she grew up – "I was there more than at home" – and her mother was an actor. Wood, the youngest of three (she has two older brothers), remembers her first role, at the age of four, playing "a dancing, singing white rabbit. My whole family are artists on both sides. There's no escaping. I think if someone in the family said they wanted to be a lawyer or accountant it would be like: 'What? You want an office job?'"

At five, she auditioned for Interview With the Vampire, but the part went to Kirsten Dunst. When she was nine, Wood's parents divorced and she and her mother moved to Los Angeles. By the time she was 14 and appeared in Thirteen – for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe – she had already appeared in several films and television series. She was home-schooled because work clashed so much with her education and her teachers gave "me more of a hard time than the kids did. They thought I was stuck up, or, I don't know, they were bitter teachers that were like, 'This girl must think she's better than everyone else' but if anything, it just made me feel more like an outcast. I just wanted to hide."

Were other kids jealous too? She smiles. "I used to get beat up in elementary school for the same reason. They would assume I was this spoilt little brat. In fifth grade, I would get held and spit on and people would throw basketballs at me and shit. It sucked. I never even fought back. I would be like: 'Why? I've never done anything, I'm not bothering you.'"

Finding it hard to relate to children her own age, Wood spent most of her time around adults, and even now she seems at least a decade older than many 24-year-olds I've met. "Yeah," she says. "Ryan [Gosling] said that: 'I don't think she's ever been a kid.'" Does she feel she missed out on a childhood? "Sometimes," she says. "I'm really happy with the good and the bad that's come with it. I felt I had to grow up really quickly and in some ways didn't really get a proper childhood but I think I made up for it later on in life."

At 19, she says, she "hopped on a tour bus, got engaged, went nuts. But no regrets, I would do it all again in a heartbeat. It was like life bootcamp."

She started seeing Marilyn Manson, and they later got engaged, although they broke up last year. They made an intriguing couple – she the blonde teenage child star, he the ghostly pale, lipstick-wearing rock star, blamed by middle America for everything from teen suicides to school shootings and nearly 20 years her senior. She starred in his video Heart Shaped Glasses, where they simulated sex while blood rained down on them. All this fuelled the cliched narrative of child-star-going-off-the-rails. "At the time everyone was getting off on seeing child stars go down the deep end and they loved watching them fail," she says, then adds in a quiet voice: "People just love picking on other people, I guess."

What magnified the attention was Manson had recently split from his wife, the burlesque star Dita Von Teese, and Wood drew much of the public criticism, with blogs calling her a "homewrecker". "If you don't know me or the situation, then you can't really have an opinion about it," she says. "The real story has never been told and I've never felt the need to come out and defend myself, because I know what happened and I know I'm not that. I don't need people's approval of my personal life."

When you have been engaged to someone such as Manson, she says, "I totally get how sometimes it's hard not to be distracted by that but I just hope that the lasting impression [of me] is going to come from the work."

It isn't an unrealistic hope. All the parts Wood has played – many in small, independent films – appear to have been selected with care, a masterclass in slowburn career-building, which she says was deliberate. "I witnessed a lot of actors my age, their parents making them do everything, and do it all now while they can," she says. "But I always thought, I'm young, I have time. I didn't want to be overexposed and fizzle out, I want to keep this going as long as possible. You have people going: 'Do this, you'll be the biggest star in the world', but the last thing I want is to be the biggest star in the world.

My parents were cool and since they were film geeks and love movies, I was never pressured to do big-money jobs or big studio films. They let me choose whatever I wanted to do, and I have been very picky. It's hard for me to do something I don't care about." She smiles and tucks her hands underneath her, legs swinging, scuffing the floor, and suddenly for the first time seeming younger than her years.