‘What does it even mean to be the world’s sexiest woman?” asks Neve Campbell. “Did they see every woman in the world? What does ‘sexy’ mean? Is what I find sexy what you find sexy?”

All good questions. I had asked Campbell to recall her early career, in which the Hollywood star was forever getting her sexiness ranked. In 1998, Empire magazine rated her No 3 in their list of 100 sexiest movie stars. More intriguingly, FHM ranked her No 31 in 1998, then 20 in 2000, and 42 in 2001. Did Campbell become more sexy in 2000 – and then less so a year later? Or was the 2000 ranking just because Scream 3 came out and she was in the news? What do I look like, a sexiness expert?

The writer and actor Mark Gatiss once blew up when I asked him how it felt to be the UK’s 38th most influential gay person, according to the Independent on Sunday’s Pink List. “It’s big pink bollocks,” he snapped. Campbell laughs when I tell her this. “Bollocks is right,” she says. “All these charts are total bollocks!” It’s lovely to hear Campbell offload idiomatic English expletives, which she does with a greater facility than one might expect, perhaps because she spent five years living in London with her now ex-husband John Light.

At the time of all this chart bollocks, Campbell was at the peak of her celebrity, in what was her second career. She had retired from ballet at the age of 15 after performing The Nutcracker and Sleeping Ballet with the National Ballet School of Canada. The reasons were injury and a stress-related nervous breakdown.

She turned to acting and, by 1994, became a star in the long-running TV series Party of Five, about orphaned San Franciscan siblings. Two years later, she starred in one of the most lucrative film franchises ever: Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s Scream, in which she played Sidney Prescott, a young woman who becomes the target of an increasingly yawnsome succession of Munchian-mask-wearing murderers.

“I’m so glad those days are over,” she says. “I felt I was being forced into being something I wasn’t – all the time.” The comedy slasher franchise dominated her career until the last money-spinning fourth instalment in 2011. Still, the 42-year-old realises that those roles paid for her current lifestyle, for her home in Brooklyn with her British-American actor partner JJ Feild and their three-year-old son, Caspian. “I’ve been very sensible with the money I made,” she says, “and I did make good money.”

Now she’s set aside such childish things. We are meeting because Campbell is back on screen this month, in the fourth season of House of Cards, the TV series about White House politicking. The last time she was interviewed by the Guardian, in 2011, she wailed that she wanted to be in something grown up, ideally a well-written cable TV show. “But there aren’t a lot of those around,” she said. “Everybody wants them.”

Now she has her wish. In House of Cards, she plays Leann Harvey, a hard-boiled, ambitious, Democratic fund-raiser sucked into the Machiavellian vortex of President Frank Underwood and his no-less-power-crazed wife Claire, played by Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright. In the first episodes, Leann is asked by Claire to bankroll her carpetbagging ambition to win a Texas congress seat, and also to help destroy her estranged husband Frank’s election chances. Can Flotus topple Potus? Leann leaks a picture of Frank’s dad in a compromising position just as the president is trying to court the African-American vote in South Carolina.

Robin Wright (left) and Neve Campbell in House of Cards. Photograph: David Giesbrecht/Netflix

Leann is as amoral, anti-democratic, power-hungry, biddable and virtuosically treacherous as every other wannabe DC übermensch character in the show. If American politics is anything like House of Cards, I say, you must be so proud to be Canadian? “Everything about American politics,” she replies, “makes me proud to be Canadian.”

We first see Leann with a pistol in her hand, pointed at Frank’s venal lackey-in-chief, Doug Stamper. It’s quite an entrance, and one that had me yelling: “Shoot him! For pity’s sake, just shoot him!”

Although Campbell plays a character who is ambitious, she doesn’t seem overly so herself, reclining on a sofa in this Georgian house in London, content to let Spacey and Wright, who are also in London, grab the limelight. “I couldn’t have asked for a better role after a few years away having a child. I don’t want to carry a network show. I don’t want to give up 10 months, working 17 hours a day, up at five in the morning. Not with a three-and-a half-year-old son. I don’t crave that attention. I’ve had it, don’t need it again. So this is perfect.”

Nonetheless, she admires Wright for her portrayal of Claire, and for directing several of the season’s episodes. “She’s driven to go beyond acting. I’m not so driven. I don’t have control issues either.”

This isn’t the first time in recent years that Campbell has been granted her wish of appearing in well-written TV drama. Two years ago, she had a lovely cameo flirting with Don Draper on a red-eye flight in Mad Men, and last year played Kitty Oppenheimer, wife of the father of the atomic bomb, J Robert, in the now-cancelled Manhattan.

House of Cards, she says, is a calling card. “I’m saying: ‘I’m back. I want to work on good things.’” Her performance, she hopes, will encourage the industry to realise she doesn’t want to be in teen slasher flicks any more. “I was offered three horror films last week.”

House of Cards has also introduced Campbell to a new experience: being asked about her politics. “I’m a socialist,” she says. While Spacey has evaded endorsing a presidential candidate, Campbell feels less constrained. “I don’t have the responsibility for the franchise that he does, so I can speak out.” Her heart says Bernie Sanders, but her head is leaning towards Hillary Clinton. “I’m worried about how much Bernie would be able to accomplish in the White House. Hillary has been in the game long enough to know how it works. I’d hate to see Trump get in.

“I don’t know if America is ready yet for Bernie’s ideology. I am, though. My father’s Scottish, my mother is Dutch and I’m Canadian, so I’m not afraid of socialism. Americans just don’t understand how it would be possible to have free Medicare and free education.”

‘I’m so glad those days are over’ … Campbell (right) with Courteney Cox and Jamie Kennedy in Scream (1996). Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar

In 2007, Campbell left Los Angeles for London because Hollywood had become unliveable. “I had security because of a stalker, which was horrible.” But that wasn’t the only reason she moved to the relative anonymity of Islington with Light, her second husband (a Shakespearean actor she met while making Alan Rudolph’s Intimate Affairs, a superb – though straight-to-DVD – movie about libidinous 1920s French surrealists).

“I wasn’t interested in the things I was being offered,” she says. “I was sitting in LA getting sad. I lived there for 13 years and I never felt at home.” Why? “LA is very isolating. It’s not a walking city and it’s not a very cultured city. In London I got culture, that’s for sure.”

She got more than that. The Guardian’s Michael Billington rubbished her performance in Robert Altman’s 2006 Old Vic production of Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues; and she was ridiculed by critics the following year for forgetting her lines in John Kolvenbach’s Love Song, playing opposite Cillian Murphy. Campbell returned to the US in 2010, divorced Light, and finally settled in Brooklyn with Feild. Perhaps, I suggest, it was the Islington years that gave you a taste for socialism – even though you lived in the stuck-up Barnsbury Square in the constituency of Islington South, rather than the People’s Republic of Islington North, for which Jeremy Corbyn is MP? “It’s not impossible,” she laughs. “JJ is a big Corbyn fan.” And you? “Not so much.”

How could she bear to leave this rain-soaked dime of a country? “London’s so expensive that people are grumpy. Or at least I found it that way. People can’t afford to live here.” Brooklyn is in America, she says happily, but not in La-La-Land. “I feel out of step with Hollywood and I love that.” In what way? “I don’t know when the Oscars are. That’s such a great feeling.” Doesn’t this sort of attitude drive your agent nuts? “I guess! When I was in London my agent was always telling me to get back to the US, always saying, ‘Don’t you care about your American profile?’”

I get the sense she doesn’t. Instead, she speaks eagerly about a script she and Feild are collaborating on about US war veterans and their struggles to fit back into society. Doesn’t she miss the adulation of her Hollywood years? “I look back and wonder who that person was, who it was they made me,” she says. “So no, no, I don’t miss that at all. I’m happier now than I’ve ever been.”