Inspirational role has changed Jena Malone forever

Actress Jena Malone. Neilson Barnard / Getty Images for Samsung

"Filmmaking is like going to war," says actress Jena Malone. It's an apt metaphor given that her latest film is Mockingjay – Part 2, the fourth and final Hunger Games movie.

The tale of a totalitarian society in which youngsters are forced by a dictatorial regime to fight to the death for entertainment concludes with a revolution closing in on the evil President Snow (Donald Sutherland). Teen movies have never been so political.

Alongside Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen, Malone’s gutsy Johanna Mason plays a key role as the rebels storm The ­Capitol.

Going to war, Malone says, left her exhausted.

“Taking on anger, for me, changed my body,” she says. “Changed some of my relationships to friends. Just living with anger was a hard thing.

“I remember being physically exhausted but also I was carrying some weird stuff on my shoulders after that film. I had to release it. It’s not all fun. But she’s obviously just a pleasure [to play].”

With her slight stature, the 5ft 5in Malone doesn’t look like the sort to punch things out.

“I’m not an angry, crazy fighter and I’m not a soft, sighing woman. I’m more like a bumbling American,” she says with a laugh. “I’m more a cowboy. I grew up in Nevada – Reno. More like a ­darker, gambling, hustler kind of cowboy.”

She moved to Los Angeles with her mother, where she started auditioning, making her screen debut, aged 12, in 1996's Bastard Out of Carolina. Since then, Malone has been in cult movies (Donnie Darko), literary classics (Pride and Prejudice) and huge flops (Sucker Punch) – but nothing quite like The Hunger Games.

She joined the franchise for 2013's Catching Fire, and admits she loves the devoted fandom the series has inspired.

“I find the undulating, passionate, innocent, beautiful love of teenagers is a glorious thing,” she says. “I’ve had a good time being able to interact with that and feed off of that. It’s almost changing what I want to create as an artist, getting to tap into their energy.”

Now 30, Malone's teenage years are behind her – a time, she says, when she was getting interested in films as varied as Thelma and Louise and Andrei Tarkovsky's "rad" Russian masterpiece Andrei Rublev – but making The Hunger Games has inspired her to create more for ­adolescents.

“They’re the true revolutionaries,” she said. “I’m only so old. I’ve got to a certain point on my soap box. There’s really nothing more than I can do. We should be making things for the next ­generation.”

In the meantime, she has a plenty on her professional plate, from a role in upcoming Hollywood horror The Neon Demon to a top-secret part in Zack Synder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (it is rumoured she will play Barbara Gordon, who fights crime as Batgirl, and is the daughter of Commissioner Jim Gordon). Both films are due out early next year.

“I feel like I’ve been in the kitchen quite a bit and it’s nice to have the food finally being out and passed around,” she says. “I’m like, ‘How is it? Is it all right? Is there enough cheese on it?’”

The Hunger Games is over, but Malone is hardly at a loose end. This year, she's overseen a record and tour with her two-piece band, The Shoe, and her first solo photographic exhibition.

“Doors are always being opened. Windows are always being closed,” she says. “I’m not counting the ones that are open, the ones that are closed, I’m just following. Sometimes you feast, sometimes you starve. And you actually need both as an artist. But I’m very appreciative to be in a feast right now.”