"The bear was just someone in a green Lycra costume running about. And the daemons were, like, green sacks. You're meant to really love these things and they're just ... green blobs." She was a bit nervous about meeting the stars, but there was nothing to worry about, everyone was really nice. (When I ask her to tell me a secret about Nicole Kidman, she thinks hard and says, "She likes Parma violets.") On the weekends, she'd go home to Sussex, catch up with her friends, and sense how much she was missing out on. But she managed to smuggle Celeste, Grace and Olivia into the movie: they're there towards the end, being abducted by Tartars, "and then I basically come along and save them, because I'm cool."
She has signed up to star alongside Ioan Gruffudd and Natascha McElhone in The Secret of Moonacre, based on Elizabeth Gouge's The Little White Horse, but this doesn't mean that she's set on an acting career. Nope. "What I want to do," she says firmly, "is do acting on the side. Do it more as a hobby than a job. I want to be able to go back to school in between, just be like a normal person. I don't want to go from filming to filming to filming, constantly. If I did that, I wouldn't be able to see my friends, ever, and I think I'd get a bit lonely." So she'll finish up at her private co-ed school, "and then go to university and then go on to teacher-training course. Because I want to be a supply teacher in a primary school. I think that'd be cool. I've wanted to be one since I was about 10." Dakota thinks supply teaching is probably a bit of a doss, because someone else will have planned the lesson, and you just rock up and supervise events. "You do get teachers who are annoying, and I want to be one of the teachers that kids really like." I wish her lots of luck. I imagine we all do.
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