There are moments of connection and vulnerability, with the co-conspirators becoming fast friends and then bitter frenemies as their vengeance quest careers out of control.

“I don’t know if this is a conversation I need to have with my therapist, but I really respond to the pain of being a young woman and growing up, and the feelings that go along with that.”

Mendes fell in love with the script, and reading together over Zoom, she and Hawke instantly found they had chemistry. The two leads like how their characters are intelligent yet full of flaws.

“Their intelligence is their power. In some ways, that’s why I respect them. Even though they’re doing nasty things, they’re thinkers and they’re scheming together and there’s something very smart about them, even though they’re doing really dumb s***,” says Mendes.

Hawkes thinks there is nothing worse than a smart enemy. “Every now and then someone has hurt my feelings, and the way they hurt my feelings, I had to be like, ‘Gosh, you’re so smart. You hurt my feelings in the exact way that my feelings can be hurt.’ Sometimes someone does something to you that doesn’t look that bad on the surface, but really hits your soft spot.”

Do Revenge: Camila Mendes, Maya Hawke in pitch black Netflix comedy

Hawkes says one of her favourite scenes in the film is the fight between Drea and Eleanor, because both of their arguments are really compelling.

“This is a credit to Jenn’s writing and directing, to set up a scene where you have two characters you’ve been following, and they both have a very strong opinion about what’s happened … Neither one is right and neither one is wrong.”

There is one character in the movie who is arguably even more villainous than the revenge-seeking duo. Max (Austin Abrams) is Drea’s ex, and she describes him as a “fake, woke, misogynist hypocrite” after he leaks her sex tape.

“I love this idea of the kind of villain that Max is, because he’s not the overt villain type. He’s this 2022 woke villain, and there’re so many of those guys running rampant … especially through Hollywood!” says Mendes.

“It’s a new kind of evil that exists in the world: the person who presents themselves as a feminist, a man who supports women and whatnot, but behind closed doors is actually quite the opposite.”

Both actresses were coming off of hugely successful shows when they were cast in Do Revenge. Mendes says she was 26 when she got the part – just when she thought she was done with high school movies.

“And then I read this. It doesn’t feel like a high school movie because it’s not really about being in high school as much as it is about working through your trauma as a teenager,” she says.

Who is Maya Hawke, Uma Thurman’s mini-me daughter?

“It wasn’t about whether or not this was the right next step [in my career]. It was just like, ‘This is just a really cool project and I want to be in it, and I don’t give a f*** that I’m 26 playing in high school. They’ll get over it.’”

Hawke says she often gets asked, at least at this stage of life, what she wants to do next with her career.

“I just want to work with people who love what they are doing … I want to keep getting to act, and I would really like to do it with amazing people who care about what they’re making.

“The second I realised that this movie was going to be that … it didn’t matter if I’d be playing a bush or a lamp post or a keychain.”

The actress, who was filming for the fourth season of the hit Netflix show Stranger Things at the same time as the movie, admits that her schedule was demanding, and that “every day [I] had to get through by the skin of [my] teeth”, but that “it never crossed my mind for a second not to do everything in my power to make this work”.

“The work she put into both projects simultaneously was so impressive, and the fact that every time she showed up to work I didn’t see the exhaustion. [Her] temperament through all of that was so impressive, and not a lot of people can pull that off.”

Hawke is thankful that everyone involved in Do Revenge cared so much about making it as good as it could be.

“I think all three of us and everyone else involved cared so much about … [L]etting the movie meet its potential, which is probably my greatest fear in life around everything. I don’t care if I’m the worst actor in the history of America or the best, I just want to be the best actor I can be. I feel like we were all constantly [asking ourselves], ‘Are we doing our best?’”

So, does this movie serve as a philosophical jumping-off point for conversation about life and morality?

“Jenn has a way of making really complicated ideas deeply accessible,” says Hawke. “Sometimes, even if you’re making a serious art film, the conversations around the movie aren’t always as interesting because the deep ideas within the film aren’t as accessible.

“I think the special thing about this movie is that it is wrestling with powerful philosophical and moral questions, but it wrestles with them in a way that would spark thoughts and feelings in a fifth-grader, a 16-year-old, a 30-year-old and your grandma. And that is freaking cool.”