Felicity Jones has Hollywood knocking on her door after her star turn in new film Like Crazy. But the former Archers actress tells Jeananne Craig she still looks forward to coming home

FELICITY Jones takes a deep breath and fixes me with her striking hazel eyes.

"It's horrible, it's horrible," she says, stony-faced. "It's an agonising, horrific process."

The 28-year-old is referring to watching herself on screen in Like Crazy, the new low-budget indie film which has been winning plaudits from film critics and awards juries alike.

"You just analyse every bit, you're only watching yourself. So you're not really watching the film properly," she explains.

Jones needn't worry. Her naturalistic turn as Anna, a British girl who falls in love with an American boy while studying in the US, is making Hollywood sit up and take notice, and earned her a prestigious Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival.

The petite actress's good looks have also landed her a starring role in the new Dolce & Gabbana beauty campaign.

Yet despite the praise and prizes, the Birmingham-born Oxford graduate remains reassuringly modest and down to earth. After giving perfectly lucid, well-considered answers, she confides: "I don't know if any of that made sense."

In Like Crazy, Anna and her boyfriend Jacob (played by rising star Anton Yelchin) struggle with an emotionally exhausting transatlantic relationship which falters as both grow older and deal with visa issues and demanding careers – Anna in journalism and Jacob in furniture design.

"As soon as I read the script I just thought it was so true and all the points that happen were just so honest. There's no gimmick or anything, it's a very unsentimental portrayal of love," says Jones.

The actress wanted the role so badly that as well as taping the two audition scenes requested by director Drake Doremus, she also submitted her take on the film's closing moment, a poignant shower scene devoid of dialogue.

That determination paid off and, within days, Jones was on a plane to the US to start rehearsals.

She admits the intense, improvised approach employed on set was draining at times.

"There wasn't really off-camera and on-camera. Whenever we were off-camera, Drake would still be filming and very much for that month we were Drake's pets, we were in the characters and in that mode of being," she recalls.

"But when you get a scene and you do it and you've hopefully been truthful, it gives you an energy. And it's exciting working with people like Drake and Anton."

Jones was only 11 when she won her first big role, playing school bully Ethel Hallow in the children's TV show The Worst Witch.

She went on to play Emma Grundy in Radio 4's The Archers for 10 years before big screen roles beckoned in Ricky Gervais's Cemetery Junction, The Tempest (alongside Helen Mirren and Russell Brand) and snowboarding romp Chalet Girl.

She grins as she recounts a recent encounter in Canada: "We were at the Toronto Film Festival, and somebody came up to me and said 'I loved you in The Worst Witch' and I was like, 'What? Really?'."

As for The Archers, she says: "When I go home, it's always on in our house so I get to catch up with what's happening from my mum."

She adds: "At the moment I'm a gypsy really, I go where the work is, and I'm travelling all over."

Did Jones relate to her Atlantic-crossing character in Like Crazy?

"When Anna's in the US, I think because she's away from home there's something more free-spirited about her, and she has that element of self-invention that people seem to have when they go to the States," she reflects.

"But it's always nice to come home. I think you go away and it can be quite freeing and liberating, but then after a few weeks you have to come back and re-centre yourself."

Jones's next appearance on screen, with Maggie Gyllenhaal in the comedy Hysteria, is a much lighter affair.

"It's about the invention of the vibrator," she explains.

"It was quite weird going from Like Crazy onto a more conventional film set.

"There were marks on the floor and they were saying, 'Just stand there and do this'. But it's great, it's a very funny script."

She's also made another film with Doremus, an as-yet untitled project co-starring Guy Pearce and Amy Ryan, again employing improvisation techniques.

Could Doremus and Jones be cultivating another Tim Burton/Johnny Depp-style partnership?

"That's a nice comparison," she says, smiling.

"I think we'll want to work together again, definitely. We've just got a way of working together that seems to work for both of us."