The elegantly wan 20-year-old actress sits on an ornate yellow chaise-longue with a blanket wrapped around her legs, and an indignant expression etched across her face. “Last night there were literally people jumping on my car and banging on the windows!” she says. “It reminded me of the scene from The Omen, with the monkeys jumping all over the hood – it was horrifying to me!”

Since her breakout turn as a troubled adolescent in the controversial drama Thirteen, Evan Rachel Wood has slowly grown accustomed to media hoopla, but clearly hates it. “I just can’t go there,” she says, shaking her head. “I’m a shy person, and this whole celebrity part is not for me. I’m literally not built for this.”

But Wood may be dealing with the clambering antics of fans for some time. In her new movie, Across the Universe, she gives a bold, star-making turn as Lucy, a prim American blueblood who travels to New York and falls for an aspiring Liverpudlian artist called Jude (Jim Sturgess). Here the relationship unfolds not through spoken dialogue but in the 33 different Beatles covers that populate the movie and are sung, with gusto, by the entire cast, particularly by leading lady Wood (she sings almost the entire length of If I Fell in beguiling tremulous close-up, Sinéad O’Connor style).

“That was the most stressful bit,” she says. “These are the most famous songs of all time, and knowing that every track you were singing was somebody’s favourite Beatles song can put a lot of pressure on.”

Wood adds that the movie is also a personal milestone, because it’s the first time that she’s been cast as a woman, rather than the truculent teen icon she was quickly becoming. The daughter of a playwright father and actress mother from North Carolina, she drifted inevitably into acting, popping up as a 10-year-old in mainstream studio projects such as Practical Magic and Digging to China. Then came the breakthrough role as a sexually precocious drug-taking rebel in Thirteen.

A Golden Globe nomination followed, as did a string of troubled teen roles (including Down in the Valley and Pretty Persuasion). But by the time Wood had reached her 19th birthday, and was cast as the younger teenage Uma Thurman in that star’s postColumbine drama In Bloom, she decided enough was enough. “I said to them, ‘This is the last time!’ ” she says. “ ‘This is my last teenage role. I’m going into that cocoon and I’m coming out as an adult!’ ” Equally significant, perhaps, in postadolescent perceptions of Wood, has been her relationship with the black-clad, Bible-baiting rocker Marilyn Manson. Before that Wood had been dating another former child actor, Jamie Bell, but started to appear on Manson’s arm and in his pop videos earlier this year.

She says of her relationship with Bell, in a quieter moment, “We still really do love each other, it’s just that the dating thing didn’t work out.”

She and Manson met one night in the Chateau Marmont hotel, in LA, and the attraction, apparently, was instant. Manson immediately cast Wood opposite him in his HeartShaped Glasses promo. The video was mostly notable for featuring Manson and Wood writhing naked in a gloomy black room that rains torrents of blood down upon them. Manson claims that it transformed Wood into the highest-paid actress to appear in a pop promo (the figure remains undisclosed).

“I would have done the video even if he wasn’t my boyfriend,” Wood explains. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Oh I see why she did it now, because she was paid so much.’ But the reason he insisted upon it was because he wanted me to be treated professionally, like an actress, and not just like his girlfriend.”

Wood says that some of the Manson musical charm seems to be rubbing off on her, and that since performing lead vocal duties on Across the Universe she has started making her own songs, and is even contemplating cutting a disc. “I’ve actually been singing for as long as I’ve been acting,” she says, referring to her childhood years in musical theatre. “I might even be more passionate about music than I am about acting. It feels like something I just have to do.”

In the meantime, there’s a burgeoning movie career to manage. She will play Anne Brontë in the high-profile historical biopic Brontë, and the fictional heroine Alice in Manson’s directorial debut The Visions of Lewis Carroll.

On reflection, and snuggling even tighter under her comfort blanket, she says that the last 12 months of car-jumping fans, gothic monster boyfriends and Alist co-stars has been a trip.

“This year has been a series of pinch yourself moments,” she says, with a who-would’ve-guessed-it shrug. “It’s been crazy. And I think that it’s only going to get crazier.”

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