The star of Venus talks about working with Peter O'Toole, and her new movie roles in Good and St. Trinian's .

An actor's first big film job isn't usually on an Oscar-nominated movie, but Jodie Whittaker isn't complaining. The 25-year-old Brit cut her film chops in Venus, the 2006 indie for which her co-star, Peter O'Toole, was nominated for an Academy Award.

"It was my third job out of drama school," says Whittaker, who played Jessie, the young, would-be model in whom the decades older O'Toole (as Maurice) takes his lusty interest. "I had no ideas of the lingo of, or acting on screen. So, my coaching was Venus, basically. But if you're going to learn, you might as well learn off of masters. Peter, Leslie [Phillips], Vanessa [Redgrave], [director] Roger [Michell] have been teaching me. And that's a dream and you can't pay for that."

The relationship between Whittaker's character and O'Toole's attracted attention because despite the tremendous age difference, there were very definite romantic overtones. But that is one of the reasons she was attracted to the script. "So much of the time, we’re kind of sugarcoated, and as an audience we're meant think that everything's like Disneyland. And everything's just lovely. And the bad people are bad and the good people win the day," she says.

"But with this, you've got scenes that do provoke. The scene with the table where she offers her hand--that's a really daring scene for a writer to write. But I think that fact that [writer Hanif Kureishi] doesn't go too far with it is fantastic as well."

One especially provocative element of Venus is how direct Whittaker's and O'Toole's characters are with one another--verbally and physically. After all, it isn't often that you see a young girl shoving and slapping a frail old man. "What a joy. It's great to play parts like that," gushes Whittaker. "It's so hard not to be a self-indulgent actor and think, 'I really want everyone to like me.' And to try and make [Jessie] really nice and really soft. But the writing didn't give you any of that from the beginning. I mean, how many opportunities in your life do you have to be really rude? And not have any guilt? Just rude."

The actress just wrapped on St. Trinian's, a bit of a departure from Venus. St. Trinian's is a British comedy remake about a school for wayward girls. "The headmistress is in drag," she explains. "She's not meant to be dressed in drag. So Rupert Everett plays the headmistress. I play Rupert's secretary, the school secretary. Called Beverly. With really pink clothes, and really bleached blonde hair, and a really weird voice."

"Oh, it was brilliant. I had so much fun," she gushes.

Whittaker's next project, Good, is currently filming in Budapest (it's doubling as 1930s Berlin). Based on a play by C.P. Taylor, Good deals with the rise of Nazism in pre-WWII Germany. "John Halder, who is played by Viggo Mortensen, is a lecturer at a university during the time of the burning of the books, and Hitler coming into power of chancellor and all that. And feeling a country in real political disarray," she explains.

She plays Mortensen's girlfriend/wife (the movie is over a 10-year period), and has done virtually all of her scenes with him. Her character "is absolutely pro national-socialist party," Whittaker divulges. "There's fantastic lines in there about people being happy: 'How can anything that makes people happy be bad?' You just think, 'Oh my God!'"

But don't let her pretty face fool you; this young actress is very smart, and very impassioned on this subject. "The Germans were.... brainwashed is not the right word. Brainwashed in a way takes away the responsibility, which I think shouldn't be done," she says. "Hitler was voted in. I think the scariest thing is, it's so easy now to sit back right now and be like, 'Oh that would never happen again.' Yes it is! It's happening everywhere! It's important to know how we can be emotionally manipulated into these things."

Whittaker does hope that when it comes out, the message behind Good will reach audiences. "I think it is a very relevant story," she explains. "It's easy to watch it and think, 'Oh, everyone's got nice costumes on.' And, 'It's the past and we know that that happened.' But when I read it, I was just scared by the fact that, God, we live in this time, and we're so frustrated as young people at the moment, and who we vote for and all that kind of thing. And there's nobody really inspiring."

Jodie Whittaker can currently be seen in Venus, which is available on DVD.