Photo: Juergen Teller for Marc Jacobs

Helena Bonham Carter’s been very busy lately.  She’s starring in a new film, Toast, that kicked off the British film festival taking place across the States this summer, making another movie with her partner, Tim Burton, and frequent co-star, Johnny Depp, and, rather unexpectedly, turning up as the face of Marc Jacobs’ fall campaign. (It was photographed, and leaked by, Juergen Teller.) Bonham Carter took a minute off working with Burton and Depp in London to answer our questions.

ELLE: Tell us about Toast.

HBC: It’s a film that originally was made for British television, for the BBC, but always intended for cinema as well. It’s basically adapted from a sort of biographical memoir by this very famous food writer (he’s famous here, I don’t know how well-known he is in America) called Nigel Slater. It’s a memoir of his childhood, very vivid, really evocative of the ’70’s and 60’s. I play his stepmother, in a way it’s like the archetype of the wicked stepmother. His mother died sadly when he was very young and his father married the cleaner; she was domestically brilliant and a fantastic cook but not his favorite person.  She definitely introduced great food to him, because much as he loved his mother, she couldn’t cook. She definitely delighted him when it came to taste. Sadly, she never shared her cooking secrets. They were sort of direct rivals for the father’s attention.

ELLE: What are you making now?

HBC: I’m playing an alcoholic psychiatrist in a film called Dark Shadows that Tim Burton’s directing and Johnny Depp is in. It’s a film version of a 1960’s-70’s soap opera, so I’m back in the same period, but I’m playing a psychiatrist, not a cleaner. I have no idea when it will be released, I guess sometime next year.

ELLE: Tell me about the Marc Jacobs ad campaign.

HBC: I just had a great day, I was amazed I was paid to do it. Frankly, I had a great day’s fun of dressing up and playing around with Juergen. He’s the least controlled, the least affected. Usually when you do press or advertisement and you’re hired as a model, it’s usually quite anal an affair, everybody has their say. You’re not really being you, you’re selling something.  But it was so liberating, and they just allowed me to do whatever I wanted. So it was great fun really, me and Juergen just had a play.

ELLE: Was it your idea to portray those characters?

HBC: It actually came out pretty organically. My instinct anyway, unfortunately, as some people can tell, is to dress up. I do like dressing up, and I feel like you’re channeling different people. They might be very unfortunate creations or sometimes more fortunate. I’ve never met Marc, but I’ve always admired his clothes. And he just said, “Would I be interested?” Also just go with it and wear whatever I wanted, if I wanted to wear shoes that were different colors. In fact there were strict instructions, “Please make sure she wears shoes that were different colors.” It came out like that. I find that it’s all play. That was what was so fun. Suddenly I found I was pretending to be a dog on the floor, snarling at Juergen, then I was Judy Garland in her latter days. We went through all different kinds of scenarios, but it was fun, it was really good fun.