You can’t lift your hands up off your knees, your face smashes upwards and flies backwards, and then you’re just kind of stuck there,” says Rose Byrne. The 27-year-old Australian actress is describing her gruelling training for the role of a space pilot in Danny Boyle’s sci-fi epic Sunshine — a freefalling zero gravity flight on an infamous “Vomit Comet” super jet. “It was basically like having an intense panic attack and an extremely heavy hangover all at the same time!”

And yet although no actual spaceships were flown during the making of Sunshine, this attention to detail (which also included compulsory quantum physics lessons for the cast) has infused the movie with an impeccable and eerie feel that is reminiscent of the first Alien movie. In Sunshine, a team of scientists, played by the likes of Cillian Murphy and Michelle Yeoh, are flown by Byrne’s pilot across the solar system on a mission to launch a life-saving super-nuke into the dying heart of our ailing Sun. Along the way mechanical malfunctions, mutinous confrontations and supernatural sabotage threaten to bring the mission to a fiery, self-destructive close.

So far, so sci-fi, so vaguely familiar (see below). However, Boyle’s meticulous designs and attention to detail mean that this space thriller is somehow simultaneously derivative and remarkably sui generis. The principal cast, who all bunked together at the University of East London in the weeks before shooting, are at ease with one another on screen, and like no other space crew you have seen before — grungy but not grizzled, charismatic but not cheesy. Similarly, the film is possibly the best-looking sci-fi movie made in the UK, balancing Alwin H. Kuchler’s breathtaking vistas with gorgeously composed interiors — a shot of Yeoh in silhouette, surrounded by flaming oxygen, will be hard to beat this decade.

But, Byrne warns, there is more to it than that. “There are deeper things going on in this movie,” she says. “If only because the subject matter is so fundamental to our existence.” She discusses the subtext of the film and the metaphysical notion that the journey to the Sun is actually a journey back to the origins of life. And then she adds: “It’s a movie about our relationship with the source of life. The idea is that the Sun is dying, somehow, because of our behaviour. And for me, that resonated quite a lot.”

BACKGROUND

• Sunshine

• Full of bright ideas

• Sunshine on my mind

• Sex in space? Not in Sunshine

Byrne as hot as the sun

From a bit-part in Star Wars to the lead in a Danny Boyle space epic, Rose Byrne is on a stellar ride, says Kevin Maher

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

Byrne has done sci-fi before. The Sydney native got her big break in 2002 when the George Lucas band-wagon came to town to shoot Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones. Her role as the near-mute Dormé, handmaiden to Natalie Portman’s Princess Amidala, was hardly a dramatic stretch. Yet it begat a slew of mainstream Hollywood turns that led her to clash sandals with Brad Pitt in Troy, trade bons mots with Josh Hartnett in Wicker Park and swap cake with Kirsten Dunst in Marie Antoinette. She has been officially declared as “the next big thing”. But Byrne is having none of it.

“I’m a cynical Australian girl and I take all that stuff with a pinch of salt, you know?” says the daughter of a Tasmanian garlic farmer and an inner-city teacher. She says that she started acting, at the age of 8, because her two elder sisters noticed that she liked to play the clown and needed the attention. But her years in the business, graduating from bit-parts in Aussie television to mainstream Hollywood blockbusters, have given Byrne a certain clear-eyed perspective. “You just ignore the media spin,” she says. “It’s very flattering, but you can’t worry about stuff like that. You just worry about the next job, the next day, the next scene.”

Byrne, who currently lives in Hackney, East London, will next be seen opposite the Matrix villain Hugo Weaving in the period boxing movie The Tender Hook, and in 28 Weeks Later, the sequel to the hit zombie film 28 Days Later. The latter film, she says, was a last-minute casting coup thanks to her new friendship with the Sunshine triumvirate of the writer Alex Garland, the producer Andrew Macdonald and the director Boyle — all of whom have reunited for 28 Weeks Later.

In the meantime, she says, despite the high-profile movies and burgeoning Hollywood career, she has no intention to go all Tinseltown. “Right now nothing has changed for me,” she explains. “I’m still the same. I still get the bus everywhere. And, more importantly, no one in Hackney recognises me!”

Sunshine is out on Apr 6

AFTER 2001: SIX MORE SPACE-STATION ODDITIES SILENT RUNNING (1972)

A prescient eco-fable about a conservationist astronaut (Bruce Dern) who places the lives of his trees ahead of his crewmates’. Cute as buttons eco-robots Huey and Dewey steal the show.

SOLARIS (1972)

Recently remade by George Clooney, Tarkovsky’s overlong classic concerns a scientist who finds on a space station two creepy men, the ghost of his dead wife and a baffling glimpse into the secrets of the universe.

DARK STAR (1974)

John Carpenter’s blackly comic debut is from a script by Dan O’Bannon — later to write Alien, the mother of all spaceship films.

SATURN 3 (1980)

The novelist Martin Amis’s ill-fated attempt to capitalise on the postStar Wars sci-fi fad. Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett are terrorised by Harvey Keitel and a randy robot called Hector.

EVENT HORIZON (1997)

A mysterious spaceship pops up out of a black hole. A crew of astronauts discover that it has returned from Hell, loaded with nightmares and ghoulish noises.

ALIEN RESURRECTION (1997)

Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) wakes up as a half-mutant-half-Amazonian-babe living in a floating science lab, in which space pirates battle aliens.

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010