Georgia Groome

Georgia Groome and Jodie Foster were both 14 years old when they played streetwise sex workers, the latter in Taxi Driver, the former in London to Brighton (2006). Which is nice, because Foster is the ultimate screen idol for the gifted girl from Derby. The actress, who got her big break in a regional theatre production of Annie Get Your Gun, is on the cusp of mesgastardom thanks to a forthcoming starring role in the big-screen adaptation of Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging. The film, based on the first of Louise Rennison’s eight ultra-popular teen chick-lit books, is loaded with Harry Potterish franchise potential. But Groome isn’t counting her cash just yet: “I can’t drive, so I don’t need a flash car, and I like living at home, so I don’t need a mansion. I’m sensible with money. It’s not why I act.”

Andrew Garfield

“I’m very neurotic and self-conscious,” explains the LA-born but Surrey-raised Garfield, 24. “So I think that I’ll know when I’m becoming a dick and believing my own press.” Which is lucky, considering that he went, overnight, from drama school graduate to a high-profile movie actor thanks to a spot alongside Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep in Robert Redford’s Iraq treatise Lions for Lambs. “I was sure they were going for someone with pecs to die for and magnificent bone structure,” he says, still dazed by it all. Garfield now divides his time between London and LA, and was most recently seen at The Times BFI London Film Festival in Channel 4’s child-killer drama Boy A. Next up – Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus (2009). Of his experience inside the Cruise fame machine he says: “Being the rookie is a safer place – for now.”

Malin Akerman

The impossibly attractive Californian is the lead singer with the pop-punk band the Petalstones, a former catwalk model, a successful TV actress and now a big-screen star with a Ben Stiller comedy under her belt and a big-budget comics spinoff called Watchmen to come. “It feels like I’m in Rocky,” she says. “And I’ve finally got to the top of those steps. It’s a pretty amazing spot to be.” The 29-year-old Akerman (she was born in Stockholm, raised in Toronto) wowed the industry recently with her gutsy turn as Stiller’s insane wife in The Heartbreak Kid, and will be seen next year as a predatory blonde in the rom-com 27 Dresses. Watchmen, however, scheduled for 2009, will be her biggest statement to date. “It’s not a comedy, I play a femme fatale, and I get to have brown hair!” What more could you ask for?

Joseph Gordon-Levitt“

My advantage is that I know the system,” says Joseph Gordon-Levitt. “Big budgets don’t impress me. They might’ve done when I was 13, but I’ve been working since I was 6.” The almond-eyed 26-year-old veteran (his first gig was a peanut butter commercial) was a charismatic moppet in films such as A River Runs Through It (1992), and in the long-running TV sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun. Recently, however, the Hollywood local (he grew up in a part of town near to the sign itself) has become a brooding Method heavyweight, generating heat and earning kudos for his intricate turns as a wounded street hustler in Mysterious Skin (2004), an adolescent gumshoe in Brick (2005), and a brain-damaged janitor in the heist movie The Lookout. So don’t expect to see him in a big-budget summer blockbuster anytime soon. “Success is not important to me, nor are power or money,” he says. “If the script feels good, then I’m in. It’s that simple.”

Ben Foster

The 27-year-old native of Iowa has a motto: “F*** therapy, let’s make a movie instead!”. Foster has transformed scene stealing into a cathartic artform with some mesmerising turns opposite Russell Crowe ( 3:10 to Yuma) and Sharon Stone ( Alpha Dog), that have deftly tapped his inner demons. “I’m a sucker for romantic comedies,” he explains. “But my most satisfying exorcisms have been with darker characters.” Drawn to drama by his local theatre group, Foster fled to Hollywood at 16 to star in Disney’s high school TV series Flash Forward. Since then he’s aced roles in teen comedies such as Get Over It (2001), and on TV in Six Feet Under, and can currently be found chewing the screen in the vampire reinvention 30 Days of Night. He has a motto, too, for his solid gold future: “The heat around young actors burns out. Natural ability and magnetism only get you so far. The rest is hard work.”

Isabelle Carré

Acting’s a funny old game. You plug away for nearly two decades, then you play a crazy masturbating stalker and suddenly everyone wants a piece of you. Such has been the experience of the 36-year-old Parisian actress Isabelle Carré, who worked for years with French film icons such as Alain Resnais and Juliette Binoche, only for her role as the sexually frustrated stalker of a doctor in Anna M (due for UK release on Nov 16) that has got everyone talking. Here, despite eruptions of violent passions, she somehow manages to humanise a deeply unsympathetic character. “That’s because I love her,” she says, “and I want to do her justice. Like De Niro as Travis Bickle, she’s fragile and needs love.” As for the buzz around her now, she muses: “It’s unreal to me. I didn’t become famous with my first movie (in 1989), so it seems like a long trip since then.”

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• Oscars

• Cannes

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette