Bonnie and Clyde (miniseries, 2013)

Australian director Bruce Beresford, whose previous film credits include Driving Miss Daisy, cast Grainger after she seeing an audition tape she sent online. ”I didn’t know she was English because she auditioned in an amazing American accent,” Beresford says.

Grainger is a ball of energy in the film, which seeks to make the case that Bonnie was the driving force for the crime spree which her and Clyde embarked upon between 1931 and 1934, during which they killed nine police officers and several civilians.

She’s both a volcanic and vulnerable Bonnie- at one point bursting into a journalist’s home to demand she gets written about- and certainly better than Miley Cyrus, an unlikely early frontrunner for the part. “When the producers first sent me the script, they mentioned Miley Cyrus,” Beresford says. “I was apprehensive but when I called back, they said, ‘We’ve changed our minds. We don’t want her.’

The director was initially reluctant to take on the project. “Originally I didn’t even want to read it but I thought the script was an interesting take on the characters,” he says. Rather than glamorise their exploits as the 1967 film did (its tagline was “They’re young…they’re in love”), the latest take on the outlaws depicts them as tragic victims of the depression. “It could easily have gone the other way,” says Beresford. “It was like that with a lot of people.”

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The new incarnation has generated controversy for taking liberties with Clyde’s passivity (Grainger describes Hirsch as bringing “stoic depth” to the role). But Beresford defends the dynamic: “That was the conclusion the writers came to when they did the research. When I did the research, I thought it was valid.”

Eight decades on from their crime spree, Hirsch sees parallels between Bonnie and Clyde and today’s ’selfie’ culture: “This narcissism and quest for fame that Bonnie and Clyde embarked on is something a lot of people have today in an age of round-the-clock celebrity. It’s this seething, crazy rage for fame that is frothing at all times. I think people will identify with Bonnie and Clyde in a really sick way.”

Grainger concurs, reckoning that the combination of her creativity and self-absorption would have seen Bonnie Parker a cyberspace natural today. “I think it’s important to differentiate between what the actual Bonnie was probably like and the Bonnie in our script”, she says, “but even in her diary extracts that I read, she seemed a lost young teen who was so lonesome and depressed with life.

"Everything was so dull and she couldn’t get anywhere. There’s an aspect of people being even more stifled back then because there was no freedom. You couldn’t find jobs on the internet. If Bonnie was alive now, she’d be blogging and sending her poetry off left, right and centre.”