by Chitra Ramaswamy, the Scotsman (March 4, 2010)

HELENA BONHAM CARTER yawns, stretches out her little feet – encased in little black boots tied with little black ribbons – and yawns again. She giggles, takes a sip of tea, and fiddles with one of many gold fob watches around her neck. We’re in a suite at the Dorchester Hotel the day Alice in Wonderland premieres in London and Bonham Carter is on mischievous, if sleepy, form. The 43-year-old actress plays the bulbous-headed Red Queen in partner Tim Burton’s 3D gothic fantasia, but in pe

Today she’s the picture of high Victorian camp, which is how I imagine she dresses both for red carpets and cleaning carpets. Her heart-shaped face is crowned by a bird’s nest of hair that could only be rivalled in height and knottiness by Burton’s. Her dress looks like it fell out of Bram Stoker’s wardrobe into Vivienne Westwood’s hands. I’m guessing there are bloomers beneath those billowing skirts.

“I was Alice-like as a child, actually,” she says in that cut-glass accent that makes her pinched vowels sound as though they’ve been squeezed into a corset. “Quite precocious, absolutely. Dreaming out loud.” She stops to ponder, rubs one of her watch faces, and goes on. “The story of Alice is about finding out who you are. People are always telling her who she is, asking her to define herself. That’s kind of like today, everyone saying, ‘Tell us about you?’” Bonham Carter makes a face as if to say she just about tolerates the absurd business of promoting films in anonymous swish hotels. “It’s all Bonkersland.”

Ironically, bonkers is the word most often used to describe Bonham Carter. It’s her metamorphosis from Merchant Ivory English rose to Tim Burton black orchid; the way she dresses like a sexy Miss Havisham; the fact she and Burton live in separate houses, with outrageous reports claiming they are connected by an underground passageway lit by candles and patrolled by bats. Actually, their living arrangements sound sensible: they get to watch telly together and spend time with their two children, but she doesn’t have to tolerate his insomnia, and he can close the door on her constant chatter. “It works ideally,” she agrees. “I’ve got nothing but good things to say about it.” How do their houses differ? “He says his is very James Bond but it’s more Tim Burton, about as original as his films,” she says. “My house looks like Wonderland. I’ve got fob watches and clocks of different sizes, lots of black-and-white tea sets.

“I’ve always loved watches and keys and key-rings and keyholes. They fascinate me. And hats. And little doors. I’ve got little doors in my garden. And pigs. I wish I had a pig. ‘Bonham’ actually means ‘little pig’ in middle English. I’ve been thinking about getting a micro pig. Do you think I should?”

Thank God for Helena Bonham Carter. While other actors fawn over their co-stars and come over all earnest about the latest charitable cause, Bonham Carter is off on a stream of consciousness about pigs. The Red Queen, a deliciously nasty creation who Bonham Carter based on Elizabeth I as played by Bette Davis with a little of their toddler Nell thrown in, likes to use a live upturned pig for a footstool. And so, it seems, would Bonham Carter.

Why did Burton, whom she first worked with on Planet of the Apes, see her as the balloon-headed baddie? “I didn’t really understand what Tim meant by Red Queen,” she says. “Then I read ‘enter queen, has huge oversized head, very angry…’ and thought, ‘So that’s how he sees me’.” She laughs, as she does at the finish of most of her sentences.

“What was your question? Oh yes. I don’t look at these characters and think ‘villain’. I look at them and think ‘mentally ill people’. And I love mentally ill people. They’re the most interesting to play. I see Bellatrix Lestrange (her character in the Harry Potter franchise] as damaged, not evil.”

On set the atmosphere was “playful”, unlike when they worked together on Sweeney Todd and Bonham Carter, heavily pregnant, ended up nicknaming Burton Big Chief Little Patience, while he called her Little Squaw Running Mouth.

“Possibly it was less tense because I had to scream all the time as the Red Queen so I got rid of any tension,” she laughs. “I didn’t have a voice after midday and that was ideal for him. I just stayed silent. Perfect! He had a Nerf Gun, so he shot me routinely. I shot him back with a machine-gun lighting gave me. It was good fun.” Are they good at leaving their worries on set? “We have to,” she shrugs. “You can’t talk about things at home. He needs to get his head away, and I do too. We just watch the news in my house.”

What Bonham Carter is interested in is transformation. Since she started working with Burton, she has altered herself more and more. In Planet of the Apes she was a chimpanzee, in Big Fish she played an old witch with an eye patch, in Sweeney Todd she was a murderous pie-maker, and as Bellatrix Lestrange she wears falsies. Now, of course, there’s the giant head. It would be easy to attribute all of this to a reaction against her “pretty” days as Merchant Ivory’s poster girl, but there’s more to it than that.

“In my first conversation with Tim, he said: ‘I don’t know you but you were the first person I thought of to play a chimpanzee,’” she says. “He had this hunch that I like to cover myself up. He was absolutely right. It’s always such a relief not to look like me. That’s why I got into acting, to escape me. And that’s the frustrating thing with acting. You think you’re losing yourself, being somebody else, changing your identity. Then you look at the film and think, ‘It’s still me’.”

She loathes this feeling so much she avoids watching herself on screen. “I hadn’t seen Alice and had to dub it. I thought, ‘This isn’t so bad. Usually I get really depressed when I’m dubbing something, but it was OK because I don’t look like me.”

Why doesn’t she want to look like herself? “Johnny does the same thing,” she muses of her co-star Johnny Depp, who she and Burton jokily refer to as the director’s first love. “I know we’re both in it to get away from ourselves. We’ve got a healthy amount of self-loathing I guess, which sparks the whole escapism thing. We like covering ourselves up. We’ve got the same urges. Ultimately it’s more to do with escapism rather than reacting to perceptions of me. I don’t think I really form my behaviour in reaction to what other people think.” She chuckles, fully aware that she’s stating the obvious.

Bonham Carter, the great-granddaughter of Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith, got herself an agent when she was just 13. Her father, a prominent banker, had suffered a stroke that left him in a wheelchair and she felt she had to help out, and strike out. It sounds as if she had an old head on young shoulders – like Alice, in fact – but these days the opposite is true. Perhaps Burton is her rabbit hole, the person who keeps her imagination fertile, her attitude non-conformist, her mindset young.

“Possibly,” she says. “I think it’s something to do with getting older too. One is much more relaxed. It’s about finding your own sense of self and not being what other people want you to be. We’re definitely a couple of big kids, and that ties us together. We’re the same age emotionally.” And what age would that be? “Well, it varies throughout the day,” she says. “Sometimes we can be old and wise, but really the oldest we get is about 12.”