As she transitions from cult supporting parts to her first starring role in a movie, Natalie Dormer has defended the bare moments of her early acting career.

Prior to portraying Cressida in The Hunger Games, the actress first gained notoriety as Anne Boleyn in The Tudors.

She regularly found herself taking her clothes when playing Anne Boleyn alongside Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ Henry VIII.

The Tudors, which has been criticized for being sensual and historically incorrect, gave the actress’ acting career a big boost, but she only accepted the role because she needed the money to pay her bills.

“When I started my career, I was grateful to get the job,” she tells Britain’s ES Magazine. “People would say, ‘The Tudors was so hyper-sexualised, why on earth would you make that decision?’ Well, I made the decision because I was unemployed. I didn’t know what The Tudors was going to be, I didn’t have all 10 scripts; I’d just got a job, for f**k’s sake.”

She took off her clothes to portray the cunning queen Margaery Tyrell.

The 33-year-old said, “There’s plenty of male nudity in Game Of Thrones, too. Sex is part of life, ergo it’s part of art. If you’re representing real life, then you will represent sex.”

She is now the lead in the upcoming psychological thriller The Forest.

Natalie plays Sara, who travels to Japan in search of her lost twin but ends up in the eerie Aokigahara forest, a known suicide hotspot, where her mental stability begins to deteriorate.

She told ES Magazine: “It means the work has paid off. First things first, I can pay the bills doing the job I love — my 16-year-old self would be very content with that. But, of course, your ambitions change.

“I’ve had the responsibility of carrying projects on stage and TV, so it was the next thing I had my eyes on, to prove I could do it on film.”

Because of the popularity of female-fronted movies like The Hunger Games, Natalie is also confident that Hollywood is becoming more inclusive of women: “The money men now know that it’s not going to damage their revenue to have a fully fleshed-out, three-dimensional female in the lead. Like, hello, guys? It doesn’t hurt to write for 50 per cent of the population. But, you know, it’s not just the film industry. It’s a society problem – we just have the platform to talk about it in our industry.”

Dormer faced criticism earlier in 2015 for remarks she made regarding her portrayal as cunning Queen Margaery Tyrell in Game of Thrones. Tyrell makes a push for dominance on the program by courting a youthful King Tommen (aged 12 in the books, but played by 17-year-old Dean Charles Chapman). However, when Dormer was questioned about the incident in an interview, her remarks were egregiously misinterpreted online to indicate that she approved of having s=x with minors. The star clarified that her statements had been misinterpreted in an August statement posted on the website Gossip Con.

“There are several things at play here,” she sighs. “The first point is that the male actors in the show don’t get a lot of flak when they’re raping and murdering, because people understand it’s fantasy, and yet if a female actress has to portray something – which isn’t portrayed explicitly – I get flak, personally.”

And the second? “That everyone in Game Of Thrones, from Emilia Clarke to Sean Bean, is aged up. When I did those scenes I never imagined I was portraying someone going to bed with an underage child.” Dormer was still concerned enough prior to filming to call the show’s creators, David Benioff and DB Weiss, to ensure she wasn’t put in a “compromising position”. Yet, had that age gap been the other way round, would the world have batted an eyelid? Dormer takes the words out of my mouth. “Frequently the age gap between a male actor and his female love interest in movies is 15 years-plus. Frequently,” she emphasises. “And the same comments are not made.”