The Dressmaker's Sarah Snook relives awkward early days: 'I didn't know what I was doing or how to stand'

Any young actress sharing the big screen with vets like Kate Winslet and Judy Davis would be forgiven for suffering from performance anxiety.

Sarah Snook, however, holds her own alongside the heavyweights and a hunk (Liam Hemsworth...swoon) in The Dressmaker. Not bad for a 28-year-old who just four years ago was making her awkward Logies debut as a newcomer nominee for the 2010 TV film Sisters of War.

"I didn't know what I was doing or how to stand," Sarah says of her red-carpet past.

That sounds a lot like Trudy, her character in The Dressmaker. She undergoes a Pygmalion-style transformation from dowdy to glamourous…but without a man pulling the strings.

Sarah's career has had quite the transformation of its own since her Sisters breakthrough. She's appeared in nine feature films, including this year's acclaimed Holding the Man, The Dressmaker and Jobs, the Hollywood biopic that reunites her with a certain Oscar-winning Kate.

Check out our interview above for Sarah's take on the difficulties of playing glam, what she learned from Kate and her own movie that she'd probably never go to see.

The Dressmaker opens in Australia on October 29.