KAYA SCODELARIO'S mother recently pleaded with her daughter over her choice of roles.

"My mum asked, 'Can you stop playing crazy characters? I can't handle it any more'," reveals the 22-year-old actress, laughing.

Perhaps understandable, given that her breakthrough role was as the beautiful and complex Effy in Skins, the edgy E4 series that that depicted teenage sex and drug-taking, and also launched the careers of Nicholas Hoult, Jack O'Connell and Dev Patel.

The job came about by chance for Scodelario. Her drama teacher had urged her to go along to an audition, but while there, she panicked, and went outside for a breather.

There, she struck up a conversation with a man who turned out to be Bryan Elsley, one of the show's creators, and he persuaded her to read for the part. Soon after, at the age of 14, Scodelario was headed to Bristol, with her mum in tow, to start shooting.

Having previously experienced bullying at school, she kept it all quiet for a long time. But, of course, the series eventually took off, in a pretty major way. Despite the show's success, though, Scodelario insists she's led a low-key life.

"Whenever I wasn't working, I was doing everything normal that I would've done," says the actress, whose mother is Brazilian. "I still live in the same flat in north London and still have the same friends from school.

"I don't think Skins affected any of us," she adds, "which is why we're all right now... so far."

Post-Skins, she starred in sci-fi drama Moon with Sam Rockwell, and fantasy film Clash Of The Titans, but it was her performance as Cathy in Andrea Arnold's 2011 reimagining of Wuthering Heights, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, which made her stand out.

"I think, like every actor, you've just to pick what you're interested in," says Scodelario.

"Acting's such a good job, in that you're stimulating and pushing yourself constantly. I'd never want to do anything comfortable.

"I wanted to do this because of how physical it is," she says of her new movie, The Maze Runner. "I'd never done an action film."

The film's based on the first book in a young adult series by James Dashner, published in 2009.

Described as a combination of Lord Of The Flies, The Hunger Games and Lost, it begins with a teenager, Thomas, waking up in a lift and being greeted by a colony of boys who welcome him to the Glade, a pasture surrounded by enormous concrete walls. None of them know how or why they got there, only that each morning, giant doors to the Maze open. At sunset they close again, and every 30 days a newcomer arrives.

But less than a week after Thomas's arrival, Teresa (Scodelario), the first girl, appears. Thomas feels an unsettling familiarity and believes they might be able to solve the Maze mystery.

The film's producer, Wyck Godfrey, was impressed that Scodelario could be "one of the guys".

"She's badass, which is what you need to be if you're going to be thrust into the world of the Glade with all these young men," he says.

The movie's directed by Wes Ball (it's his feature film debut), a man Scodelario describes as "brilliant". "Any day we were feeling tired and exhausted, we'd talk to Wes for five minutes and he'd get you back there."

And that was most days, as there's a lot running in the movie.

"I'm the unhealthiest person in the world. I'm not fit at all. My lovely friend George helped me train. I cried a lot and he helped me through it. But I still like a fry-up more than anything else."

Not that her newly-defined muscles helped her cope with the humidity of Louisiana, where some of the movie was shot.

"It was hot, humid, with lots of bugs, but it was a lot of fun. I've never been anywhere like that before, and I loved it."