She’s upright, she’s intelligent, she’s real, she’s pretty, she’s brave, she’s Beowulf, but Sidney is not, and never can be, in on the joke. Otherwise, we’d all go to Scream films and not know where to put ourselves, and where’s the fun in that?Campbell is the only famous person I’ve ever met who is exactly the same size in real life as she is on the screen. Same width, same height, same colour, same level of realness This is quite odd. One feels compelled in the face of such unexpected authenticity to frown with intuitive suspicion, much as Campbell does in the films. It’s as if the two hours I’d spent that morning in a preview theatre in Soho, being made to jump and snigger by her latest movie, were only an adumbration of the interview we’re about to attempt in the Dorchester, and that at any moment an Arquette is going to flump through the doorway with a breadknife in his or her neck and the remnants of something sardonic dying on his/her lips. Campbell would narrow her eyes to glinting slits, thrust me into a window bay, pull out a huge, nodding gun and declare to the empty suite that she’s ready for you, you bastard, wherever you are, while I scream and claw at the curtains behind her and narrow my own eyes into dull, unreadable slits.It doesn’t happen. Campbell sits and smokes with her socked feet up on the coffee table She offers me a fag.

She apologises that I had to see the film at such an inappropriate hour – she hates horror movies, too. And she explains seriously that she’s pleased that “people seem to think that the new one’s better than the first two Pleased and surprised.” I concur. I certainly enjoyed it more than the splattery first one and the tittery second.”Well,” she says kindly, “maybe that’s because it’s fresher, less gory, more about the black humour and the people.”She is quite lovely. She dresses down, Sidney-style, in green T-shirt and nondescript trousers, like a proper 26-year-old. Her hair is hoiked back at the sides but left to arch freely across her beetling brow. She smokes properly, too, with the cigarette held up next to her face. Her overbite is only allowed out unselfconsciously when she laughs.”Ah-heee-heee-heee.”It’s a marvellous laugh.

But what’s unusual about it is that it doesn’t obey the rules of laughter. Unlike the overbite, it pops out in quite unregulated fashion And you don’t have to have said something funny Perhaps this is why I find her as charming as I do. She laughs at my jokes before I’ve made them; sometimes when I’m not even trying to make one. For instance:I wonder, Neve, if you’d had the opportunity to write your own part in the Scream trilogy whether…”Ah-heee-heee-heee…”…whether you might have given yourself the odd joke or clever thing to say?”Well, the truth is I’d have probably written it the same Because it’s my job to be the eye of the audience When I first came to the script I struggled a bit with this. Everyone else had fantastic lines – very funny, great attention on them – and I felt: am I supposed to be like that as well?” She smiles benignly. “But my job was to be the character the audience follows and cares about, and who seems to be based in reality. It wouldn’t have worked if Sidney’d been snide or sarcastic or witty.”I wonder, then, in the light of the fact that you have to shoulder such a mighty moral burden in Scream…”Ah-haaa-haaa-heee.”…whether that had something to do with the decision to appear in Wild Things?”Wild Things was extremely different from anything I’d done before Suzy Toller was not moral She was complex Very controlling, manipulative and evil.