Chloë Grace Moretz says her happy family life helps her brush off critics on social media (Picture: Nino Munoz)

In real life, Chloë Grace Moretz is one sweet, all-American, apple-pie kind of girl. Cast her in a movie, however, and she will often appear as a freaky outsider, whether as a vampire in Let Me In, a gothic teen loner in Dark Shadows or a foul-mouthed killer in the Kick-Ass films.

Now she is at it again with a fresh adaptation of Carrie, Stephen King’s debut novel, which director Brian De Palma filmed with Sissy Spacek back in 1976. Like Spacek, Moretz takes the title role, playing a troubled outsider, bullied at school, who eventually snaps and unleashes terrifying telekinetic powers.



‘I don’t think I actively look for the losers,’ muses the 16-year-old. ‘I just choose characters that are the very opposite of who I am because I think that is what acting is. If I play a happy girl with a happy family and a happy life and who is very good, just like me, it is not acting.

‘I like playing characters who deal with problems that are much darker than what I deal with. It is like my therapy.’


Her current stint at on-screen therapy comes courtesy of director Kimberly Peirce, a close friend of De Palma, who made her name as the writer/director of 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry, which won Hilary Swank an Oscar. Peirce’s adaptation of King’s debut novel, which casts Julianne Moore in the role of Carrie’s mother, drags the school bullying suffered by the unfortunate teenager into the cyber-world of the 21st century.

The famous shower-room scene, for example, has evolved, with her classmates now filming a stricken Carrie on their smartphones and posting the results on the internet. Moretz escaped the horror of school bullying – she has been home-schooled since she was nine – but says that, as an actress, she has suffered troll abuse online.

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

‘I didn’t have a difficult experience at all in high school because I finished regular school in fourth grade,’ says Moretz, who first came to international attention playing Hit-Girl in the first Kick-Ass film before working with the likes of Scorsese (Hugo), Tim Burton (Dark Shadows) and Marc Webb ((500) Days Of Summer).

‘But none of my best friends is an actor. They are all normal kids so I’ve seen it, and I have dealt with a lot of stuff as an actor, which is a lot is scarier than high school.

‘I’ve dealt with a lot of things through social media, which is 400,000 high-schoolers hating you! You make one comment and you get death threats, you make another and they are in love with you.’

Has she really suffered online death threats? ‘Yeah, I have had a lot of stuff come my way but I don’t like singling it out, because when they see you single it out, they do it more. I am slowly figuring out that maybe I should stop getting on these social-media platforms and start being a little bit more guarded.’

The online community certainly asked questions of her casting in Carrie. ‘A lot of people said: “You are not skinny enough for Carrie, you’ll never be Sissy,”’ says Moretz.



‘But, to be honest, I am not trying to be anyone else or trying to live up to the expectations of what we have already seen. I am not Sissy, she’s an amazing actress, and she did this role when she was an adult.

‘And just because my big break was Kick-Ass, a lot of people would look at me and say: “You are way too strong for this character. You are way too independent; you have never dealt with anything in your life.”

‘Yet they have no idea who I am – even my best friends have no idea what goes through my mind – so for a moment I felt like I justified myself; I needed to show people I can be this character. But then I realised I don’t need to prove that as long as I am happy.’

Happiness, she says, comes from acting and from her tight family unit (her mother and her brother, Trevor, manage her career, the latter taking an executive producing credit on Kick-Ass 2).

‘My family keeps me on the ground; I have four older brothers and they are all very, very protective,’ she says. ‘They are like four fathers. I have the acting and singing dad, the business dad, the mathematics dad and the sporty dad. It is like I have the Spice Girls as my brothers!”

She has recently finished playing a prostitute in the big-screen re-imagining of the Edward Woodward TV series The Equalizer, which re-teams Training Day duo Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington. Like Dakota Fanning’s character in Man On Fire, her story inspires Washington’s character to commit visceral violence.


‘To be honest, I just like really dark characters,’ concludes Moretz. ‘Those roles can get you down a little bit but I can always cheer myself up afterwards.’ And how does she do that? ‘Working out helps,’ she says, ‘but mostly I cheer myself up by playing Abba.

‘When I was doing Carrie, my mum caught me on video dancing on the kitchen table, still in my robe, covered in blood, and jumping around to Dancing Queen. That’s a great release.’

Carrie is out in cinemas tomorrow.