Role Recall: Helena Bonham Carter Talks 'Fight Club,' 'Harry Potter,' 'Alice,' and More

When imagining what his Red Queen would look like in his trippy 2010 adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, director Tim Burton drew a picture of the giant-headed ginger and handed it to his then-partner Helena Bonham Carter. “He showed it to me and said, ‘Well, that’s obviously you,” Bonham Carter told Yahoo Movies. “I couldn’t quite see the immediate resemblance, given that she had a massive head.”

Noggin size aside, Bonham-Carter was ultimately perfect for the role, as she has been in so many other films (including Big Fish, Sweeney Todd and the Harry Potter series) that needed a villainess who can toggle between slightly unhinged and fully explosive. The 49-year-old London native reprises her role as the Red Queen in this week’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, which sends Alice (Mia Wasikowska) back down the rabbit hole to help the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) deal with some family trauma.

Over the course of her long career, Bonham Carter has also played plenty of elegant, non-evil women, and it was two of those parts, in Wings of the Dove and The King’s Speech, that have earned her Oscar nominations. In our latest episode of Role Recall (watch above), Bonham Carter talks about discovering Anthony Hopkins’s surprising memorization trick on Howard’s End, spending the day naked with Brad Pitt while shooting Fight Club, getting sick from eight hours of makeup during Big Fish, and more. Some more highlights:

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A Room With a View (1985)
Bonham Carter’s first-released movie was this James Ivory-directed, Ismail Merchant-produced adaptation of the 1908 E.M. Forster novel. “Everything was very, very impromptu about that film, so it was amazing that it got made at all,” she said. “They didn’t have any money. So they would just stop traffic illegally. [A producer] shoved Maggie Smith into a shop, pushed her, didn’t realize it was Maggie.” Was the future Downton Abbey star okay? “Not really,” the actress laughed.

Fight Club (1999)
Bonham Carter delivered a fierce performance as Marla Singer, the hopeless, chain-smoking girlfriend to (spoiler alert) brawler Tyler Durden (Edward Norton/Brad Pitt). Costarring as a smoker in a movie directed by David Fincher — who notoriously shoots countless takes — is not easy. “So after about 26 takes, you’re just absolutely a basket case,” she said.

The Harry Potter series (2007-2011)
The actress relished playing the role of the evil and feisty sorceress Bellatrix LeStrange over the course of four Potter movies (Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, and both parts of Deathly Hallows). “She’s very sick and twisted. It was one of those tiny parts, but I think I probably milked it to death,” she said. And she was very convincing. “Somebody actually just shouted in fear — it was an adult — when they saw me in Hempstead not that long ago, because they thought I was Bellatrix. It was like, 'Flipping hell. Haven’t they worked out that I was pretending?’”

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Alice Through the Looking Glass opens May 27. Watch the trailer: