In Martin Scorsese’s upcoming thriller Shutter Island, Emily Mortimer runs away with the show as an on-the-lam patient who breaks down opposite Leonardo DiCaprio. Though she starred in David Mamet’s Redbelt last year, the English actress is just now earning her black belt in bitchery, by kicking around her 10 least-favorite things.

It's an odd feeling, to sit down with someone, just hours after you've seen them play a film character so different from their real-life persona. But that's what happened when Emily Mortimer walked into a room at the Essex House in Manhattan, to talk about her role in the upcoming thriller Transsiberian. The night before, I was watching her as Jessie, a reformed party animal who, with her harmless, down-home husband Roy (Woody Harrelson), crosses the unforgiving terrain of Northern Russia on one of the last of the great railroads, the Transsiberian. Before you know it, she's covering up a murder, flushing heroin down a toilet, and dangling off the back of a speeding train. A day later, here she sits before me, American accent replaced by a British one, munching on a brownie and fiddling with a pen.