‘Kids are quite trepidatious around me’: Helena Bonham Carter brings her brand of formal oddity to Alice sequel

Helena Bonham Carter has never been afraid to let her freak flag fly, either on-screen or off. In Disney’s return trip to Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical Wonderland, Alice Through the Looking Glass, the two-time Oscar nominee reprises her role as the bombastic, egomaniacal Red Queen, who tries to thwart Alice (Mia Wasikowska) as she travels back in time to try to save Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter.

On a recent afternoon in Los Angeles, we spoke to Bonham Carter about standing apart in homogenised Hollywood, working with frequent collaborator and long-time partner Tim Burton, from whom she separated in 2014, turning 50 and scaring small children.

In Alice Through the Looking Glass , we learn the Red Queen’s back story and get some understanding of how she came to be this cruel monster. Did you always have empathy for her from the start?

Of course. When you’re taking on somebody, you have to have compassion and work out how they became like that. With bullies, it’s always that they have an inferiority complex and they have to put other people down to make themselves feel OK. She had to chop off everyone else’s heads because they had normal heads and she had an abnormal-sized head. She’s so brutal because she’s so vulnerable. It’s a protective armour.

How did working with director James Bobin on the sequel differ from working with Tim Burton on the first film?