"I would never be the type of person who just flies to Cannes to party and go on the red carpet."
It'll be interesting to see if that changes, given Moretz has been dating 15-year-old Brooklyn Beckham, son of David and Victoria. Recently glimpsed with his father and Vogue's Grace Coddington and Anna Wintour at New York Fashion Week, watching his mother's spring/summer 2015 collection, he's evidently more comfortable with that world.
They met at SoulCycle, the spin class beloved by the Beckhams, and have been seen together at a succession of music gigs - everything from Ed Sheeran to Jay-Z's Made In America festival.
Naturally, Moretz is cagey on the topic - though she's let things slip, from calling the Beckhams "a really sweet family" to showing her admiration for the way Brooklyn wants to follow his father into football. "I enjoy someone who is on my level with the seriousness kind of thing," she says.
It's rare to come across a young actress so motivated. She gets riled when thinking about the "several movies" where she's come on set, a little ray of sunshine, and been met by "totally cold and stand-offish" actors. She refuses to name names, saying, "I have to respect everyone", but then offers an interesting morsel.
"A lot of people from the older generation are very set in their ways. It was a different time period when you're a mega-star in the 80s and 90s; like now it's a different world."
She assures me she's not talking about Denzel Washington, her co-star in The Equalizer, a nominal remake of the 1980s TV show starring Edward Woodward as vigilante private detective Robert McCall.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua, the film has Washington playing McCall as a former black-ops soldier living with a new identity, working a day job at a hardware depot. Like Woodward's character, he sets out to protect the innocent, starting with Moretz's Teri.
Never mind that Moretz has already worked with such luminaries as Martin Scorsese (on Hugo) and Tim Burton (Dark Shadows), she's currently high on The Equalizer. "It's one of my favourite movies I've ever made. Antoine Fuqua is, like, back in force. He kills it. He's one of the best directors ever, hands down. It's a solid, solid movie."
Chloe Grace Moretz is dating Brooklyn Beckham, son of David and Victoria.
Indeed it is - if you like watching Washington violently scythe his way through a succession of East European heavies like a latter-day Charles Bronson.
Yet however much The Equalizer is just a gory slice of pulp fiction, Moretz took it seriously. "It's some scary stuff - and the scary part is it's very real. It's very, very real. Sex-trafficking is a huge issue."
Visiting Children of the Night, an organisation dedicated to getting young girls off the streets in America, Moretz befriended a number of those in its care. "I hope I pay tribute to those girls - because they're the strongest girls I have ever met. They're amazing people. They're bad-ass."
Moretz regularly returns to the shelter in Los Angeles. "You know as an actor they give you free clothes all the time? It's so stupid and I don't want any of them; I don't need the clothes. If you're giving them to an actor, who can buy their own clothes, give them to a shelter! So every time I get boxes, I don't even open the boxes. I just take them straight to the shelter and go, 'Here you go, here's your stuff, because this is not what I need. I just do my job. I don't deserve that'." She recently worked with Steven Soderbergh on The Library, an off-Broadway play about a survivor of a school shooting. He told her to only ever choose a project if she'd do it for free. "And that's how I've always lived my life," she says. "I've never been like, 'I'm only going to do this project if I get paid $5 million!' - I've never lived my life in that way." It's why you'll find her in indies like the recent If I Stay and the forthcoming Say When, co-starring Keira Knightley.
Pausing, she thinks for a second. "You're unhappy when you're making the projects that your agents want you to make." Still, they're probably not unhappy that she signed on for the highly anticipated Dark Places, an adaptation of the novel by Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn.
"It was one of the hardest projects I've ever done, and it was the darkest," Moretz says. "It's the darkest I've gone as an actor. When you see the movie, you will not recognise me." Given her track record to date, that's saying something.
Who: Chloe Grace Moretz
What: The Equalizer
When and where: Screening at cinemas snow
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- Independent
