Thanks to roles alongside alpha actors from DiCaprio to Fassbender, statuesque actress ELIZABETH DEBICKI is making waves in Hollywood. And, as Daphne Lockyer discovers, she’s more than a match for her leading men in the BBC’s gripping new Le Carré thriller

'As a teenager I wasn’t comfortable with being taller than other people, and I’m sure I stooped a lot. But I also did ballet training and that helps,' said Elizabeth Debicki

Elizabeth Debicki describes herself as having ‘gypsy bones’ and ‘the restless spirit of a traveller’.

Wanderlust is as much a part of the splendid DNA that she inherited from her parents – two ballet dancers who travelled the world before settling in Australia – as the willowy limbs and porcelain skin that make her such an arresting beauty.

It’s probably just as well, since these days her life is spent very much on the move.

Today she has travelled to our shoot in London from her parents’ home in Melbourne via Paris, where she has been shopping and seeing old pals.

Tomorrow it’s back to the French capital, where she was born, then on to Los Angeles, where she has a Hollywood agent, and then Louisiana where she’s making The Tale, a film with Laura Dern and Ellen Burstyn.

‘On the plus side,’ she laughs, ‘I now have packing down to a fine art.

'On the minus, I spend half my life in health-food stores trawling the vitamin aisle in search of the magic pill that will cure jet lag and zap viruses that you’re always catching on planes.

'Sadly, I haven’t found it.’

Elizabeth wears DRESS, Luisa Beccaria. RINGS, Cartier, Monica Vinader and Gemporia.com

Not that the 25-year-old actress is under par when we meet to talk about her role in the BBC’s highly anticipated six-part adaptation of John le Carré’s 1993 novel The Night Manager, a tale of political intrigue set in the brutal world of the illegal arms trade.

She is, in fact, a picture of health and while she has played out-and-out baddies – such as the arch villainess Victoria Vinciguerra in last year’s reboot of The Man From UNCLE – it’s quite a relief to find that she can also be both fun and girly, with an appealing self-confidence that is matched only by her 6ft 2in frame.

‘My younger sister is also very tall and my little brother, who is just 17, is 6ft 6in, so we’re the Amazonian Family,’ she says.

‘As a teenager I wasn’t comfortable with being taller than other people, and I’m sure I stooped a lot.

'But I also did ballet training and that helps, just as it does to have a mum who was a dancer herself and would whack me between the shoulders to remind me to straighten up!’ she laughs.

Now, she says, she loves her height and sees it as something that makes her easier to spot in the crowd, both literally and metaphorically.

‘Granted, it’s not easy to be a super-tall woman in Hollywood. But there are times when it works in my favour.

'In The Night Manager, for example, both of my co-stars, Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston, are also well over 6ft and it was lovely to look a co-star in the eye and not have them standing on an apple box!’

Given the strength of her CV, it’s difficult to imagine what roles she might have missed out on.

Elizabeth wears COAT, Paul & Joe. Dress, Maria Lucia Hohan, from matchesfashion.com. RINGS, Cartier, Monica Vinader and Gemporia.com

Her breakthrough came in Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 movie The Great Gatsby alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, playing the part of professional golfer Jordan Baker.

This was followed by a stint on stage in the Jean Genet play The Maids, in which she starred with fellow Aussie Cate Blanchett, an actress she’s increasingly compared to.

‘To be mentioned in the same sentence as Cate is incredibly flattering,’ she says.

‘Every day with her is like a masterclass, not just in how to do the job, but how to handle fame and remain a decent person.’

Cate’s wise words included: ‘Be careful who you take advice from’ and ‘Always wash your own socks.’

In other words, never get too grand or too starry, which, given how Elizabeth’s career is going at the moment, could be a temptation.

In the last year alone, after all, there’s been the aforementioned Man From UNCLE, for which she was handpicked by Guy Ritchie (‘though I forgot to switch my Skype on when he was due to phone and, by the time I realised, I’d missed ten calls from him. I thought I’d blown it!’).

This was followed by the disaster movie Everest alongside Jake Gyllenhaal, then a role as Lady Macduff in the movie version of Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender.

In The Night Manager, she plays the key role of Jed, the trophy girlfriend of ruthless arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper (Hugh Laurie).

‘She lives with a lot of dark secrets from her past,’ Elizabeth says. ‘She appears glamorous and put together, but underneath she’s a pretty damaged survivor.’

The relationship between the two is put to the test when British intelligence infiltrates Roper’s corrupt network with agent Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston).

Jed finds herself falling for the charismatic Pine and a love triangle – fuelled by power, rivalry and sex – develops.

Elizabeth wears Dress, Stella McCartney. Rings, Bulgari

‘There were lots of love scenes,’ she admits. ‘But not a single one of them felt gratuitous. The idea of a powerful older man with a much younger woman on his arm could feel like a cliché, but here I don’t think it does.

‘Yes, people will ask themselves, “Why are Jed and Roper together? Is it just a sex thing?” But, strangely, what Hugh and I discovered while playing the roles was that these two people really love each other.

'They’re a funny match, but it works for them and it worked for us when we played them.

'The Night Manager is much more than just a standard thriller. It reminded me of Homeland in the sense that what you see happening on the screen is a reflection of the current world situation,’ says Elizabeth.

It helped that the drama – a collaboration between the BBC, The Ink Factory (run by Le Carré’s sons Simon and Stephen Cornwell) and AMC (makers of shows such as Mad Men and The Walking Dead) – was in the capable hands of the award-winning Danish director Susanne Bier, whose other credits include In a Better World and Love Is All You Need. She brings a female sensibility to what might be considered a male genre.

‘You think, “John le Carré? Espionage, thriller – boys’ stuff!”’ says Elizabeth.

‘But, in our version, not only is Susanne directing but one of the main characters, Burr – the head of the anti-arms smuggling unit and a man in the original novel – was played by [Broadchurch star] Olivia Colman who was pregnant at the time! So this definitely feels like a more female version all round.’

Filming locations included Switzerland, London, Majorca and Morocco.

‘Marrakech, especially, was a highlight, although there were moments when we were shooting in the desert and there were snakes and scorpions and 50-degree heat; that was tough,’ Elizabeth says.

‘On the other hand, Olivia and I became great friends and the two of us – one a blonde the size of two Moroccans standing on top of each other and the other a hugely pregnant woman – toured the souks together.

'We did get stared at quite a lot! But I had the best time with Olivia and I adore her.’

Elizabeth (centre) with the cast of The Night Manager (from left): Hugh Laurie, Tom Hiddleston, Olivia Colman and Tom Hollander

She is similarly besotted with Hugh, describing him as smart, funny, talented and handsome.

‘I’m gushing, aren’t I?’ she laughs. ‘But, honestly, I loved working with him. And he’s a brilliant musician. I made him promise that he’d teach me everything he knows about jazz.

'Hugh sends me an album a week and I’m currently obsessed with a compilation by jazz pianist Keith Jarrett.’

She recalls first meeting Hugh in LA shortly after she was cast to play Jed.

‘We had breakfast together at a diner and sat for hours. I ordered a pancake stack, but he insisted on also ordering me his favourite thing on the menu – a milkshake with bananas and peanut butter.

'And, even though I eat like a racehorse, I couldn’t manage it, which he has never let me live down.

'He talks about how we’re going back there and this time I’ll drink the milkshake. He makes me laugh all the time.’

The best actors, she’s discovering, also tend to be the nicest and most generous – such as her Macbeth co-star Michael Fassbender.

‘On my first day we were filming the scene where my character is burnt at the stake, which was totally harrowing for me.

'Michael didn’t know me at that point, but every time we cut, he’d flip out of this extraordinary performance and come over to check I was doing OK,’ she says.

‘He’s not just a great actor, but an absolute gent.’

Elizabeth comes from a close and supportive family. Her father is Polish; her mother an Australian of Irish descent. They met while working together at The Lido, the famous cabaret on the Champs-Elysées. They moved to Melbourne from Paris when Elizabeth was five.

‘So I’ve grown up feeling very much that Australia is home,’ she says, ‘although I’m also incredibly comfortable in Europe.’

Her breakthrough came in Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 movie The Great Gatsby, playing the part of professional golfer Jordan Baker

Even after their dance careers ended, both parents remained connected to the arts: her father worked in the local theatre; her mother set up her own dance school.

‘It was a creative household,’ she says. ‘We were taken to the theatre, cinema and the ballet, and at home my mum would be cooking in the kitchen and choreographing a dance production at the same time.

'My friends would come round and say it was the coolest house in the world and I’d be like, “No, it’s so weird!” At that age you just want to be like everyone else.’

She was, she says, an outsider at school, saved only by the ‘posse of other oddballs’ who made up her friendship group.

‘I was an English and history nerd and when I wasn’t studying I was dancing.

'My friends and I were very much on the periphery of cool – whatever the thing was that you were supposed to be. And I was perfectly OK with it.

‘But, still, looking back, it certainly wasn’t a very comfortable experience and I prayed it would be better once I got out of there. And it was.

'When I went to the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne to study drama I felt I’d finally found my place in life.’

Her parents, she says, might have wished that their daughter had gone into a less nomadic profession than theirs.

‘I did flirt with the idea of going to law school,’ she laughs. ‘But not for long.

'Maybe I’ll play a lawyer one day – the beauty of acting is that you can try on so many different roles without having to commit to them in real life.’

Elizabeth was handpicked by Guy Ritchie for The Man From UNCLE (‘though I forgot to switch my Skype on when he was due to phone and, by the time I realised, I’d missed ten calls from him. I thought I’d blown it!’)

In reality, for example, she wouldn’t be in a relationship with a man like Richard Roper in The Night Manager.

‘I can see why someone who’s both completely charming yet as dark and dangerous as him would be attractive and sexy, but that wouldn’t be for me. It’s not who I am,’ she says.

Instead, she favours men with emotional depth and intelligence, although she won’t say if there’s one on the scene right now.

‘If you’re a nomad, as I am at the moment, then it’s difficult in terms of family, friends, whatever…’ she trails off.

She’s in the process of moving from Sydney back to Melbourne and is buying a loft-style apartment in the city.

After filming The Night Manager, she went back to her home town for a couple of months to chill out on her mum’s sofa and reconnect with ordinary life.

‘On a film set everything’s done for you. You get to a stage where you can’t even remember the last time you made yourself a sandwich.

'The crazy thing is that, as actors, we’re trying to portray the human condition, but we’re often not living in reality.

'I probably drive everyone mad on set insisting on making my own tea and coffee but it’s just one small thing that helps me to stay a little bit grounded.’

Not quite washing her own socks, but Cate would be proud of her.

The Night Manager starts later this month on BBC One

Debicki’s picks

READING

Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays which is set in Hollywood and Las Vegas in the 1960s. It sums up the mood of a generation. Also Mislaid by Nell Zink. It’s an unusual story about two mismatched people who get together and have children and the consequences that echo down the years.

STUCK IN A LIFT WITH

Ryan Gosling – for obvious reasons.

ESSENTIAL BEAUTY PRODUCTS

I’m a SK-II girl and I use its skin masks obsessively, especially if I’m jet-lagged or am about to do anything in front of the camera. They are brilliant.

STYLE ICON

Cate Blanchett has great style, hasn’t she? And I think that Tilda Swinton looks amazing and different and very beautiful.

TOP DESIGNERS

Prada would be my number one because the designs are completely groundbreaking. But I also love Armani, Valentino, Lanvin and Saint Laurent.

FAVOURITE SUNDAY MORNING

Cooking myself breakfast, reading the paper. Sleeping!

MOTTO