THERE are some offers an actor simply cannot resist sinking their teeth into.

Offers like the one made to Sheila Vand, star of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, by director Ana Lily Amirpour.

"She said she wanted to make a black and white vampire film that was going to be a cross between Sergio Leone and David Lynch and she wanted me to be the vampire," laughs Vand down the line from New York. "That was enough for me to be intrigued."

A hit at Sundance and the Glasgow Film Festival, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is set in a fictitional Iranian town called Bad City. Into those mean streets filled with drug addicts, prostitutes and lost souls in general, ventures The Girl, played by Vand. Clad in a chador and riding a skateboard, The Girl follows her own path, one into which a handsome young man strays.

Part love story, part vampire movie, and shot in glorious black and white, A Girl whispers cult movie, with Vand quite the coolest representative of the living dead since the Swedish reinvigorated the vampire genre with Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In. The fact that the dialogue is in Farsi adds to the air of other-worldliness.

A born and bred Los Angeleno, Vand is fluent in Farsi, the language of her Iranian parents, a computer engineer and accountant. They first came to America as students in the Seventies, returned to Iran, then settled permanently in Los Angeles in 1984.

"My parents have always been very strict about me speaking the language at home. It was something I fought when I was a rebellious kid but as soon as I got a little older I really understood how valuable it was. Now I'm the one who is strict about speaking it with them because I don't want to forget. Coming from an immigrant family there is a sense that each generation the culture gets diluted, so I do feel it's partially my responsibility to maintain as much of the culture as I can because eventually it is going to dissolve and that makes me sad."

Her parents have seen the film, though she was a little nervous about that. "There are drugs, sex, nudity, me being nude..." she laughs. "But they loved it."

Though there has been the slightest of thaws in relations between Iran and America, there was no possibility of filming in Iran. Iranian cinema is now world renowned, with the likes of A Separation winning the best foreign film Oscar, but officials continue to swing between wanting to show the modern face of Iran to the world and keeping strict control of artists. So somewhere else had to stand in for Bad City, and Amirpour found the perfect place in a deserted oil town in the Californian desert. That suited Vand, who has never been able to travel to Iran.

"It's such a strange thing. The culture has been a big part of my life but [Iran] also feels like a mythical place because I've never actually been there. So in some way it felt very appropriate that Bad City was a fictional ghost town because Iran has always felt like a fictional place to me. And the Iran that my parents are from doesn't exist any more."

The closest Vand, 29, has come to Iran was filming Argo in Istanbul. The Ben Affleck triple Oscar-winner, set during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, also had to avoid the country for obvious reasons. Vand plays a housekeeper for the Canadian ambassador. It is also her voice at the start of the picture, setting the scene as Iranian students ready to storm the US Embassy.

Having hitherto done shorts and television, Argo was the UCLA graduate's first taste of a big studio film, and she reckons she landed lucky. "There were no divas, there were no egos, everybody was really working together as a team." She felt the same when she made her Broadway debut with Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. In the cast was one Robin Williams. "He easily fell into a mentor figure. We all looked up to him so much, he was really the leader of the pack in that experience. He had a work ethic that I had never really witnessed before and it's something I still strive to live up to."

Aside from Argo, viewers in America perhaps know Vand best from the television spy drama State of Affairs, where she played a CIA agent called Maureen James. It must have made a nice change, I suggest, to break out of the "Middle East" pigeonhole.

She understands why, being of Iranian descent, she won such roles before, and is grateful for them. "But in some ways I feel more American than Iranian because I was born and raised in this country. It's a strange thing to feel like I have to prove my American-ness. It's been a blessing to be Middle Eastern because it's a portal into a very competitive industry but I was very happy with the role in State of Affairs to just play a normal American girl because that's also what I am.

"It's always a bit of a fight to break [out of] the pigeonhole. It's very easy to get stuck. Someone once told me you just have to keep changing the pigeonhole. I'm trying to do that."

She is certainly achieving that with her performance art, including a project with the painter and photographer Alexa Meade which involved Vand having her body painted and lying in a bath of milk. The resulting pictures were strange and beautiful. Vand did suffer slightly for her art, mind.

"It is actually quite uncomfortable to get the body in the right position with that much milk around you. It's more difficult than it seems. Luckily we had a shower in our studio space which was very necessary. We really pushed the boundaries with it. There was one point at the beginning when we kept the milk overnight to see how much we could milk it - no pun intended. We quickly realised we were taking it a bit too far. But we wanted to use milk because it is a living substance."

She has also created Sneaky Nietzche, described by the LA Times as "an interactive steampunk-themed musical performance featuring a 40-person ensemble and a full band." Clearly, Vand's art is as important to her as retaining Farsi.

"It's something that I do more for myself and my spirit. The fact that I don't do it to make a living has been very liberating. There's a lot of stuff I've developed that I haven't even put out there because I don't make art for other people. As an actor everything I do is to service somebody else's vision or project. My art is for me."

She will be seen next in the drama The Highway is for Gamblers, then Fun House, the adaptation of war correspondent Kim Barker's memoir starring Tina Fey. The 30 Rock star has become another role model. "She manages to juggle a lot of hats with so much grace and without making a big deal out of it. She's the coolest."

[itals] A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night opens in cinemas tomorrow