She’s made five films with her husband, English director Paul W.S. Anderson, including the very successful Resident Evil films. In their latest collaboration, Monster Hunter, Jovovich plays a US Army Ranger with a lot on her plate.

As Captain Natalie Artemis, she leads a desert reconnaissance mission in search of a missing unit when a freak wind storm thrusts them into a frightening parallel world dominated by giant dinosaurs and insects that live beneath the sand.

Most unpleasant they are too and Artemis and her team face an uphill struggle to survive.

“It’s crazy-looking,” Jovovich says. “And to see these hardened soldiers realise that their technology isn’t going to save them against these massive creatures is quite something.”

A lot of special effects then, but not as much as you’d think.

“Actually, only a small part of this was shot in studio, in front of a green screen,” she says. “When Paul wrote the script, he was adamant that we use locations because he said he wanted to make a real movie, not one built in a computer program.

“So we shot in South Africa and Namibia, sometimes in places that had never been filmed before.

"They were just spectacular locations and so other-worldly, it felt like you were on a different planet. And it really helped us as actors because instead of being stuck in front of a green screen, where you have to act at nothing all the time, you could just react to what was around you.

“We were battling these extreme temperatures because in Africa, there is no middle ground, you know — it’s either really hot and really, really windy with lots of sand blowing into your mouth and eyes, or it’s freezing, and really, really windy with lots of sand blowing into your eyes.”

The shoot was full of physical challenges, but Jovovich is up for those — in fact, she relishes them.

“I love it. I always say that if I wasn’t an actor, I might have joined the military because I’ve always really enjoyed pushing my body to the limit. I like working with weapons, I like going to extreme locations and camping, and I’m good at taking orders. I like to work in teams.

“On the shoot, I really wanted to live my everyday life as close to how a soldier lives as possible, just out of respect, you know, especially as I was playing a female army ranger.

"And so any time I felt lazy or I didn’t want to get up, I’d be like, ‘what would a ranger do’, and I’d get up and do what I had to do.

“During filming, we would have a 6am call time, so I’d wake up at four, do my workout for an hour and then, at 6am, be in the make-up chair. And it was really valuable because that was so difficult every morning that the rest of the day was easy for me, you know?

“It’s almost like you challenge yourself so much at the beginning of the day that it mentally helps with feelings of being overwhelmed.

“Growing up, I’d suffered depressions and I’d never really gotten diagnosed because I was a child of the 80s and 90s, but I feel like it was always a struggle for me, just dealing with who am I, where do I stand in the world.

"So I feel like this really changed my life in such a positive way. Having that physical exertion every single day has just made me feel so much stronger.”

It’s astonishing to think that Jovovich was just 12 when she first began appearing on magazine covers, even younger when she did her first movie, Two Moon Junction.

Born in Kiev, she moved to Los Angeles with her parents at the age of five and found it hard to fit in at American schools.

Her mother, Galina Loginova, was a film actress and groomed her daughter for success, sending her to acting class and preparing her for auditions.

“The modelling kind of took off first,” she says. “And I think at the start I was just pretending to be my mom because she was always so glamorous and this big movie star from Russia with all the make-up, and people were just like ‘oh my God, what is this creature?’.

“I mean, when I look at those pictures now, I can see a child, but back then, it was like the Brooke Shields thing, woah, what is this.

"By the way, it would never fly today, but back in the 80s, it was exciting to see this little girl exuding like an adult. So it took off. There was a lot of controversy, a lot of brouhaha about it.”

Critics were not especially kind about her first faltering steps as an actress. The Golden Raspberries voted her the ‘Worst New Star’ of 1991 for her performance in Return to the Blue Lagoon, in which, at age 15, she appeared naked.

After it, she took a break from acting and moved to Europe where, eventually, she met Luc Besson.

“It was tough for me because I wasn’t really prepared for failure at such a young age. I was such a dreamer and such a kid in a way, and I wasn’t the best actress, I wasn’t a natural performer.

"I mean I look at my eldest daughter and she’s just such a naturally gifted actress — it’s uncanny. And I’m like, ‘oh God, if I could just have one fourth of her talent, where would I be today’.

“But I had more life experience when I started out, you know. My parents had migrated to a new country, it was like the school of hard knocks.

"I watched my family suffering, I saw my mother crying because she was like a movie star in Russia and then came here and was a nobody.

“It was hard for me growing up. We had nothing and my parents had to work really hard, and then to watch them fighting because of money and other things.”

Reading was her salvation.

“My mother had me reading literature from an early age,” she says. “By the time I was 13, I’d read War & Peace, Zola, Balzac. I was a reader and it kept me sane.” 

Monster Hunter is released in cinemas today.