Helena Bonham Carter relishes a walk on the cinematic dark side. Why being wicked never felt so good!
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Helena Bonham Carter was once known as the “corset queen” of British cinema for her roles in period dramas such as A Room With a View (1985) and The Wings of the Dove (1997). Today, the 43-year-old actress is busy exploring femininity’s darker side, from the all-singing, all-murderous Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) to a recurring role as the Lord Voldemort-worshipping witch Bellatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter films. But there’s bad and then there’s the Red Queen, her character in Tim Burton’s latest fantasy extravaganza, Alice in Wonderland.
Reigning over Wonderland with an iron fist, the Red Queen is hell-bent on killing Alice, the girl who stumbles into her domain after falling through the rabbit hole. The Queen’s head is grotesquely big, and her catchphrase is a dictatorial “Off with their heads!”
“I gravitate to baddies now,” admits Bonham Carter in a phone interview from her home in London, England, where she lives with Burton and their two children, Billy Ray, 6, and Nell, 2. “I’m over the romantic characters — I’m too old for them,” she says. “Now I get to play the baddies — the character parts. I love playing damaged people. There is a fascination with them: ‘How on earth did you get to be like that?’
A self-described “intellectualizer,” Bonham Carter drafted a psychological profile for the Red Queen before playing her. “At the heart of every bully, there’s someone who is quite vulnerable and terrified — someone who has been rejected or fears rejection,” she says. “The Red Queen probably had a terrible childhood, and now she’s punishing everybody else for her deformity.”
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