‘It’s normalised. I was gawping’: Imogen Poots on making a movie in the West Bank

Imogen Poots has a confession. “I drew a man’s penis too big recently,” she says, her anime eyes widening. The 35-year-old London-born actor is sitting at home in New York in an olive baseball cap. Willygate occurred at a life-drawing class she attends in Brooklyn. “The art teacher said I needed to get my proportions right, so I erased what I’d done. But then the model, who looked like a young Sam Shepard, came over and saw where the original penis had been, and realised it had been downsized.” She is pondering whether to find another class. “There’s a bunch all over the city but I’m running out of options.”

She already had to flee one through no fault of her own. “There was a man there who glommed on to the fact that I’m an actress. Another man was drawing me instead of the model. It was the model who told me, which then affected how I drew her. It all felt kind of meta. Other people had witnessed our conversation, too, which made it deeply uncomfortable. I don’t handle those things well. I’m pathologically polite but inside there’s a burning furnace.” She thinks this over. “That’s Englishness, I guess.”

In her new film, The Teacher, directed by the British Palestinian film-maker Farah Nabulsi, Poots emphasises her endearingly gauche side, bringing unusual layers to a role that could have felt perfunctory. Hers isn’t the main plot: that belongs to Saleh Bakri as a schoolteacher in the West Bank, who tries to discourage a pupil from seeking revenge on the settler who murdered his brother. Poots is an ingenuous British colleague, Lisa, who is doing her damnedest to keep the students on track academically. Their nickname for her is Miss United Nations.

“It was clear to me that there was some fun to be had with her,” she says. “Of course, she’s a huge eye-roll. Strolling in there, pale as hell, wearing factor-100, and saying: ‘You must finish school.’ Well, why must they? There’s an arrogance to that sort of superciliousness about the Middle East.” Poots even fell prey to it herself while chatting with a textile designer who worked on the film. “I said, ‘You’re incredible at this! Why don’t you come to America and do it?’ And she said, ‘This is my home. I want to make it big here, and then I can employ my grandmothers.’ It was so naive of me.”

Had she pretended she was in character, it wouldn’t have been far from the truth. “My observations as Imogen were similar to what Lisa was experiencing. I learned so much while I was there. Learned and unlearned and reformed an analysis of what the Middle East is and what’s going on.”

On one of her days off, she and Bakri headed to the beach in Haifa, which was about 90 minutes away from where they were staying in Nablus. “I told the man at our hotel where we were going, and asked if he visited the beach often. He said, ‘I don’t have an ID card, so I’ve never been.’ He’s been looking at the sea for his entire life but has never been able to reach it.”

Every day brought a new revelation. “There are the planes coming down low, the watchtowers, the relentless surveillance by the Israeli military. We went to Hebron and there were streets which my Palestinian friend was not permitted to walk on because the military had oppressed that right. These were all normalised things that I was gawping at.”

The Teacher premiered at the 2023 Toronto film festival, just over three weeks before the attacks of 7 October. “That obviously escalated everything but this has been going on for decades,” she says. “It’s just that our understanding in the west has been intermittent and fragmented. I think what the film shows is that empathy shouldn’t be selective.”

Finding a distributor for The Teacher has been, as she puts it, “an absolute nightmare. It’s hard for people to consider that this film might actually be a good thing and that it isn’t propaganda. It’s trying to open up the situation so that you have a perspective from both sides.” She looks glum. “It’s obviously a difficult sell.”

Her presence should make it more attractive. For nearly two decades, Poots has been a model of investigative acting, digging away at her material to unearth buried complexities. In recent years, she threw herself fully into Vivarium, in which she and Jesse Eisenberg are tricked by sinister forces into raising a monstrous child in a labyrinthine housing development. In the gripping, mosaic-like thriller Baltimore, she was bravely guarded and unknowable as the British heiress Rose Dugdale, who masterminded an art heist to barter for the release of IRA prisoners.

Probably her first extraordinary work was in 2013 as the cocaine-addicted daughter of the pornographer Paul Raymond, played by Steve Coogan, in Michael Winterbottom’s The Look of Love. Poots, who grew up in west London and is the child of a current affairs producer and a journalist, had shown versatility early on as she moved from the zombie sequel 28 Weeks Later into period drama (Jane Eyre) and US indie prestige (A Late Quartet, with Philip Seymour Hoffman). There had been little, though, to prepare audiences for her flayed and fragile performance in Winterbottom’s film. Whether ordering champagne through a cascade of wounded tears, breaking bad news to her father by chopping it out in cocaine form, or performing the Bacharach and David title song in a version just poor enough to signal that the character was oblivious to her own shortcomings, she stole the film.

After that, everybody wanted her, including two giants of 1970s US cinema. First, Peter Bogdanovich cast Poots as a sex worker in his screwball comedy She’s Funny That Way, with Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston. Mention that director and her face lights up. “On the first day of shooting in the West Village, Peter was wearing a suit and a cravat,” she says. “He would soak the cravat in ice-cold water then put it on again because of the heat. He shouted down the street to everyone: ‘Welcome! Welcome to the picture!’ It was such an old-school showbiz thing to say. I found it deeply moving.”

Bogdanovich gave precision direction (“faster!”, “slower!”) whereas Terrence Malick, who cast Poots as a winsome Amélie type in Knight of Cups, was positively nebulous. “I said to Terry: ‘I’d love a vague notion of where my character is from.’ He said, ‘Oh, she’s like smoke. She’s from everywhere and nowhere.’ It was actually helpful. He was suggesting that you can’t fail as long as you are the flesh embodiment of smoke.” I confess that the only thing I can recall about the movie is the scene in which she passes a homeless man and lays a flower on his foot. “Oh God,” she says. “That’s quite annoying, isn’t it?”

When Poots started out, she craved high-calibre material, and sometimes resented having to do any other kind. She still refers to the wham-bam 2014 action movie Need for Speed as “the race-car film”, as though to use its actual title would jinx her.

“Back then, I was still in the grasp of the low art/high art conundrum. I was probably angry because it wasn’t a Cassavetes film. Now I disagree with my younger self, and I think that conversation is tedious and unimaginative. You can look at Tarkovsky’s Stalker in the same way as that brilliant scene in No Hard Feelings when the boy is playing the piano to Jennifer Lawrence. Expression doesn’t need to be cerebral or academic to hold great importance.” There speaks a woman who played Anthony Hopkins’s carer in the devastating Alzheimer’s drama The Father and poker-faced her way through Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, in which the singer Seal is savaged by wolves while performing at her wedding.

Lately, she has found a kindred spirit in Kristen Stewart, no slouch herself at balancing high-fibre cinema with the popcorn variety. Stewart pounced on Poots to play the lead in her directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, adapted from the swimmer turned writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of grief, abuse and addiction.

“Kristen and I have been secretly worshipping each other from afar,” she says. “It’s really something to have someone believe in you that much. She’s had a mad life and yet she is one of the most authentic people I’ve ever encountered. As a director, she is relentless in the best way possible. She put her sweat into this film.”

Shooting finished three weeks ago but Poots still looks dazed with gratitude. “You live your life and make your choices, and agents along the way try to funnel you into wearing an Orc costume so you’ll be in a hit, and you veer off to the left or to the right, and then you find yourself face-to-face with an artist like Kristen.” Her eyes go full-beam again. “And suddenly everything makes sense.”

• The Teacher is in cinemas from 27 September