Emma Roberts has been busy. Since starring as my personal teen hero Addie Singer in the Nickelodeon series Unfabulous, she’s run amok at an English boarding school in Wildchild, lent her voice to Family Guy, explored coming of age in Gia Coppola’s beautiful film Palo Alto and is now filming the first season of Ryan Murphy’s chilling dark comedy Scream Queens. Murphy, who’s behind genius TV shows American Horror Story and Glee, called on Roberts to play Chanel Oberlin, the semi-sociopathic president of a sorority on a campus headed up by Jamie Lee Curtis. The cast also includes Lea Michelle, Abigail Breslin, Ariana Grande and Nick Jonas to name a few (well, more than a few) and the trailer is equal parts hilarious, horrifying and spine-tinglingly dark. “It’s kind of my dream show,” laughs Roberts. “It’s a little bit Heathers and a little bit Halloween, two of my favourite movies. I loved Drop Dead Gorgeous and Jawbreaker when I was younger too, so to be on a show that has a similar dynamic of the popular girls and the misfits interacting with each other and unraveling is really fun.” Clearly Roberts has got her references on lock and later on she admits she’s “fascinated by Hollywood”.

Scream Queens – set largely in big empty houses in New Orleans – is far from LA, though. “It’s fun to shoot a scary show in one of the scariest places in America,” Roberts tells me. “New Orleans has quite a spooky energy to it and we do a lot of night shoots. When you have 10 people on set who are all really good friends, there are a lot of laughs and a bit of terror.” The opportunity to play a role like Chanel was clearly a no-brainer for her. “It’s so fun to go to work every day and put on these amazing outfits and say these hilarious and wildly inappropriate monologues – I’ve always been drawn to characters like that.” I wonder if she feels liberated by the opportunity to play a young woman who doesn’t conform to your typical whimsical love interest. “There aren’t a lot of roles for younger women that are written the way Chanel is and actually all the girls on the show are. It’s really cool that we’re getting the opportunity to kick some ass and show that girls can be funny and cool and strong. And we can do it all in heels.”

For such a young actress, Roberts – niece of Pretty Woman babe, Julia – has thrown herself into a range of challenging roles. In Palo Alto and Adult World, which she starred in as a young poet alongside John Cusack, Roberts demonstrated a keen interest in the intricacies of adolescent life.“The older I get, the more I look back on being a teenager as such a fascinating time in my life,” she explains. “I remember it was really hard not feeling like an adult and not feeling like a kid and you see that in the characters of those movies which are both very special to me. I was 21 when I filmed Palo Alto but I was playing 17 and I feel like if I really had been 17 I wouldn’t have been able to do it – having already lived through those years, I could draw from them.”

For Roberts, the pressure you face in your teenage years, especially as a girl, must have been intensified massively by being in the public eye from such a young age. I wonder if she ever wished for an escape. “The hardest part is the lack of privacy,” she agrees. “It’s really difficult, but I’ve been used to it for so long that I don’t know what it would be like any other way. I’m also really glad things like Twitter and Instagram weren’t as intrusive when I was 14 or 15 as they are now.” That pressure to show your best side is something we can pretty much all identify with, and it seems like there’s a new wave of young celebrities who are determined to disrupt precisely that intrusive, superficial image culture.