QUESTION: So is there an exciting story behind how you got to be cast as Wendy?

RHW: My grandparents heard about it on the television and told my mom. One day when I came home from school, she measured me to see if I was within the height restrictions, without telling me what she was doing. I was confused as to why she was doing that. Then she told me that I was within the height restrictions and I got really excited and I thought, “I’d love to do an audition.”

QUESTION: How tough was the audition process?

The tableau of a young maiden falling prey to the depredations of a film’s major villain is one of cinema’s most infamous clichés. The forment of a beautiful girl so horrifically compelling on paper, all too often fails to move an audience in-theatre. Convincing a faded cinema goer to sympathize with her plight takes an actress that can simultaneously portray her character as an innocent, yet also display enough in the way of budding sexual curiosity to seduce the observer into feeling at least a pang of grief that she is in such peril. One such actress is Rachel Hurd-Wood, a girl who at just seventeen has already been the onscreen victim of so many accomplished actors; molested by Jason Isaacs in Peter Pan, deprived of her maidenhood by Donald Sutherland in An American Haunting and bludgeoned to death by Ben Whishaw in Perfume, while Sissey Spacek, Alan Rickman and Rupert Everett have all been arrayed as defenders of her virtue.