Alien: Romulus' Cailee Spaeny still learning how to be a star

American actress Cailee Spaeny, the seventh of nine children born to committed Southern Baptists, left school in Missouri at age 13.

She had found work at a theme park, Silver Dollar City, in the Ozark Mountains, which allowed her to strike out on her own.

"I was just so ready," she said. "I definitely had a feeling that I needed to experience something else really early on. I wanted out of this Midwestern box." Silver Dollar City was that first step.

The next year, she took another one, persuading her mother to drive her across the country to Los Angeles, where she quickly secured an agent and a manager.

More trips followed, more nights sleeping in the spare rooms of friends of friends, or of families met at church.

Finally, when she was 17, she booked a role in the action movie Pacific Rim Uprising (2018).

Casting directors noticed her then. Wryly, Spaeny narrated what happened next. "This fresh-faced little girl comes to town," she said.

"She's from the Midwest, she's got a bit of an accent, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed. They jump on that opportunity." Spaeny, now 26, is still reasonably bushy-tailed. She has wide-set eyes, an open countenance suggestive of some Great Plain, and an unfussy femininity that she can ratchet up or way down as a role demands.

There is also an intensity to her, a tinge of the steeliness that had her paying her own way when she was barely a teenager. Hollywood jumped on that too.