Hollywood Is an Industry of Looney Tunes Pretending to Be Normal

Published: 03 November 2025. The English Chronicle Des. The English Chronicle Online.

Imogen Poots has always been known for her raw honesty and defiant charm, but her latest interview reveals a deeper truth about Hollywood’s eccentric core. Sitting in a lively Soho bar the morning after the London Film Festival premiere of Hedda, the British actor doesn’t mince her words. “A few years back, a director told me I had an ‘attitude problem,’” she recalls with a wry smile. “He said it in front of a whole crowd of people, which was lame. But in hindsight, I take it as a compliment. Yay for attitude problems.”

At 36, Poots, the star of 28 Weeks Later and The Father, has learned to embrace her directness in an industry that often punishes authenticity. “My tolerance for nonsense has always been pretty primed,” she laughs. “People assume I don’t see what’s going on, but I’ve got big eyes — I see everything.”

Her eyes — wide, expressive, and disarmingly sharp — seem to say as much as her words. She arrives in high-waisted jeans, a white T-shirt gifted by Emily Mortimer, and worn Nike Classics. Her chipped black nail polish and finger tattoos — the letters “AY” for her late friend Anton Yelchin — add an unfiltered human touch to her film-star glow. “This is an industry of absolute Looney Tunes parading as if they’re normal,” she says dryly. “And then these same people make movies about the human condition. It’s absurd.”

That unflinching candour carries into her new projects. Poots stars in The Chronology of Water and Hedda — the latter a reimagining of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, relocated from 19th-century Oslo to postwar Britain. Directed by Candyman filmmaker Nia DaCosta, the adaptation turns Hedda’s world into a vibrant yet toxic tableau of 1950s glamour, deceit, and decadence. “It’s really Nia,” Poots says. “Lush, beautiful imagery — but always undercut by pain and corrosion. She told the costume designer she wanted the dresses to look like rotting fruit — plums, apricots, something sweet but spoiled.”

The comparisons between Hedda and Saltburn were inevitable, but Poots waves them off. “It’s such a lazy comparison,” she scoffs. “People see parties, rich people behaving badly, and they go, ‘Oh, it’s Saltburn!’ It just shows a lack of imagination. There are far more daring films out there.”

The conversation turns philosophical when Poots discusses the concept of the “muse” — a label her character earns in Hedda. “It’s funny how people now see ‘muse’ as a dirty word,” she muses, waving her hands as though sculpting her thoughts. “A muse was once something beautiful — a source of inspiration. Take Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol; that was a two-way street. She gave him just as much as he gave her.”

She cites Diane Keaton as another example. “You could argue she was a muse for Woody Allen,” Poots says. “But that’s because he was lucky enough to capture this miraculous person. I have my own muses — people, books, even songs — that I go back to when I feel low.”

A few days after our chat, Poots messages to expand on her point. “With social media, everyone’s become their own muse,” she writes. “But that’s where it gets dark. You’re no longer looking outward for inspiration — you’re just filtering your own face, trying to matter to someone. It’s like everything’s become this weird echo chamber of sameness.”

Her reflections seem to capture the existential tension of modern celebrity: a generation obsessed with self-image yet starving for authenticity. Poots, who has managed to stay refreshingly grounded in an industry of illusions, speaks from experience. She’s been acting since she was a teenager, appearing in V for Vendetta at 15 and making her breakthrough in 28 Weeks Later. Forgoing drama school, she learned her craft on set — an approach that gave her performances an unpolished, instinctive quality.

Across two decades of work, she has built a reputation for playing women with fractures beneath their composure — characters who shimmer with intelligence, insecurity, and rebellion. From the indie darling Green Room to the West End stage opposite Imelda Staunton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Poots has consistently chosen complex roles over commercial comfort. “I never wanted to be an actress just for the sake of fame,” she says. “I wanted to understand people. That’s what acting is — a form of empathy.”

That curiosity about the human experience is what makes Hedda such a perfect fit. The film unpacks the social confines of the 1950s — the silent expectations of women, the fragility of male egos, the hidden rot beneath upper-class civility. “Hedda’s world feels old-fashioned,” Poots says, “but it’s really not. It’s about control, freedom, and the masks we wear to survive.”

In person, she’s as candid about the industry as she is about herself. “There’s a lot of absurdity in filmmaking,” she says. “The idea that people who live in such constructed worlds can turn around and tell stories about reality — it’s kind of insane. But that’s the paradox, right? It’s crazy people pretending to be normal who often make the best art.”

Still, despite her sharp critiques, Poots remains deeply in love with cinema. “I grew up obsessed with movies — Terrence Malick, Peter Bogdanovich, all those beautiful dreamers,” she recalls. “Films made me believe in possibility, in chaos, in beauty. That’s never left me.”

Her mix of idealism and realism defines her. There’s no ego in her words — just humour and heart. “Sometimes people mistake sensitivity for fragility,” she says. “But it’s actually a strength. You’ve got to be open to the world if you’re going to tell its stories.”

Imogen Poots might call the film industry “Looney Tunes,” but she’s one of its most grounded truth-tellers — a performer who brings sincerity to even the strangest of worlds. With Hedda and The Chronology of Water, she continues to carve a path that’s fiercely her own, unfiltered and unafraid.