YOU could argue that acting is basically the acquisition of new skill sets. Ellie Kendrick's career is a case in point. On HBO fantasy drama Game Of Thrones, where she plays Meera Reed and spends most of her time dragging crippled seer Bran Stark around on a sled, she has learned how to fire a bow and arrow and skin a rabbit (handy skills to have in the event of any future apocalypse).

For forthcoming film, The Levelling, Kendrick went to Somerset and learned how to milk a cow (ditto, as long as cows survive said apocalypse). And as for Whisky Galore!, a new remake of the classic Ealing comedy, well, that would have been acquiring the ability to dance an Eightsome Reel (less useful in an apocalyptic scenario, admittedly, but excellent for any future Scottish social occasion that might be on the horizon).

I'm astonished that she couldn't do it already. But maybe being a Londoner, that shouldn't be a huge surprise. In fact, the whole cast were sent for dancing lessons for a wedding scene in the movie. Come the night, they were all suitably Eightsome Reel-ready.

"At first it was really fun," Kendrick recalls. "We were having a great time. We were filming it at night and by one o'clock in the morning we'd done it again and again and again. I thought, 'I don't know if I will ever dance another Eightsome Reel in my life.' My toe went black, we were dancing so hard."

It's Monday morning. Still early. Kendrick is sitting in her Deptford home in shorts (it's going to be a good day, she says). Soon she'll be returning north of the Border for the Whisky Galore! world premiere as the Edinburgh International Film Festival's closing gala. (And who knows maybe getting the chance to show off those recently acquired Scottish dancing skills in any post-premiere party type development?)

But for now she's talking to me. And on her birthday too. Kendrick is 26 today, June 6. Game Of Thrones fans have already posted a ton of happy birthday tweets this morning. I feel bad for making her work.

"You know what?" she says. "The internet lies. It's actually my birthday on Wednesday. I think it says my birthday is June 6 because I played Anne Frank in a BBC series and her birthday is June 6 and somewhere that got mixed up. Weird. I often get friends saying 'happy birthday' on the sixth."

Well, I don't feel so bad now. Let's ask some more questions. Actually, no. Maybe we should do a proper introduction first. Kendrick, who went to public school, is a Cambridge graduate and something of a young meteor in British acting circles. Aged 18, she was playing Shakespeare's Juliet at the Globe. Her performance as Anne Frank in BBC One's 2009 mini-series dramatising the short life of the diarist and Holocaust victim drew rave reviews. ("Everything about her performance is right," the Guardian reviewer said at the time.) Then came Game Of Thrones and cult status.

"She's unbelievably talented," suggests Edinburgh-based filmmaker Hope Dickson Leach, who directed Kendrick in The Levelling. "She's very bright, has a fantastically analytical clever brain – which can get in the way for some actors. But in Ellie that's combined with a very visceral, intuitive desire to understand how human beings work and to tell stories. She's a powerhouse. She responds in ways that make you up your game."

That's the kind of build-up that might help make you look forward to Whisky Galore!. Because, let's be honest, on paper a remake of Alexander MacKendrick's 1949 classic, a comic take on the real-life 1941 shipwreck of the SS Politician near the island of Eriskay in 1941 and the unauthorised taking of its cargo of whisky by the locals, doesn't seem absolutely necessary. And whether the involvement of Eddie Izzard and Gregor Fisher in the leading roles is a threat or a promise, I leave to your own judgement.

But Kendrick's involvement as Catriona Macroon, the tomboy daughter of the island's postkeeper (played by Fisher), and the fact that the director is Gilles (Small Faces) Mackinnon leaves room for hope.

Kendrick understands why viewers might be cautious. "It's always a gamble to remake something. Especially something that's been well received." But, she says, the casting of Izzard made it interesting (she's a big fan). Then there's the beauty of the northeast Scotland landscape where the film was shot. And anyway, most people of Kendrick's age have never heard of the original. "So it would be nice to bring the story to a new generation."

Not new to her, though. "I saw the film as a kid when I was really young. And in our house, we often used lines from the film as catchphrases, such as the classic "there's no whisky" line. It was sort of like a family joke. So everyone was excited when I got the part because it keyed into a part of our family identity.

"And I just think Catriona is a lot of fun to play and I like doing comedy. She is one of the two very mischievous daughters who are allowed to get away with murder frankly, mainly, I think, because their mother isn't around and their father indulges them and is at a bit of a loss as to what to do with their burgeoning womanhood. So they get up to all sorts of cheekiness on the island."

How's Kendrick's Scottish accent? Can she still do it months after shooting? "Sadly not. I thought this was going to be a party trick. When it came to re-recording some of the lines of the film in ADR [automatic dialogue replacement] a couple of months ago I was listening to myself thinking, 'How am I going to make that sound again?' I had no idea. It's funny how alien it can become so quickly.

"It's a really fun one to do," she adds. "It's such an unusual sound even to mainland Scots ears. It makes a really beautiful sound, I think."

While we're talking all things Scottish, the title does rather raise a question, Ellie. Are you much of a whisky drinker? "Now I am. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing. I see it as a good thing. I didn't know anything about whisky and in fact didn't really like it. I only had a bourbon in a whisky sour every so often. I thought, 'I'm going to be stuck up in Scotland and all of these people are going to be drinking whisky and I'm going to be the boring one who says no'.

"But then because we were in Speyside filming we were surrounded by the best whiskies in the world and luckily some of the other cast members were quite seasoned connoisseurs, especially Sean Biggerstaff. He'd introduce me to different whiskies and now I've started to really enjoy it. And then we went on a tour to a whisky distillery. I'm trying to remember whether it was Glenfarclas or Glenfiddich. I think it was Glenfarclas. I didn't like whisky before and I now realise it was because I hadn't tried Speyside whiskies."

Talk to her for any length of time and it's clear she enjoyed the shoot. She will tell you about the night she spent in a Portsoy pub with the cast and crew, many of whom are musicians, all of them playing together. "I still have a video of it on my phone. People playing spoons and the fiddle and people singing. It was lovely because everyone in the cast and crew were getting together and making beautiful music."

Then there was the night she and a few others ended up on a deserted beach near Cullen Bay. Eddie Izzard brought his portable barbecue and some whisky and they just sat there, enjoying the food and drink, the landscape and the company. "It was really lovely. One of those moments I will treasure."

Distillery visiting, pub singing, barbecues on the beach. Did you actually make a movie, Ellie? "We did," she laughs.

For most of us, I'm guessing Kendrick is best known for dodging wildlings and white walkers north of the wall in Game Of Thrones. She doesn't really do social media but she is still aware of the level of noise that accompanies every episode of the fantasy series. Yes, she's heard the theory that her character Meera is in fact Jon Snow's sister. She doesn't think it's true. In the original novels, she points out, author George RR Martin describes the characters very differently. But she can't say for certain. "You know as much as I do on that one."

I tell her that when the series started, the gender politics of the thing disturbed me. Women were nearly always sexual objects. That's changed now with the female characters being the strongest in the series. But even so.

She skips round the concern. "I suppose I'm in an isolated world with my character. I really like that Meera's femininity isn't referenced much. That's quite rare for a female character and she gets to wear trousers and shoot the bow and arrow and kill the white walker. She's the first woman to kill a white walker, which I love. So in terms of my storyline I'm really happy playing a woman who's pretty bad-ass."

Maybe it's now time for some back story. We could begin it at Benenden, an independent boarding school in Kent, where Kendrick studied. It was also where she started acting after being cast, aged 12, as the Artful Dodger in a production of the musical Oliver. She carried on acting right through her Benenden years. "I was really lucky because I got to play all the boys' parts which are often, sadly, better written than the women's, though that's changing now."

The appeal of acting, she says, is the mental process of inhabiting other patterns of thought, speech and movement. "I'm not necessarily one of those actors who thinks deeply and hard about their craft and all of that stuff but I really enjoy working in a group of people who are all pretending to be other people. Which probably says something really strange about my mentality."

Although initially wary about her career choice, Kendrick's parents supported her through it all, taking her to auditions, accompanying her onto sets when she was under 18, turning up to watch everything. "It's the ultimate compliment if my mum says, 'You know what? That was really good.' She's a very honest critic. My very first professional play I was playing Juliet at the Globe when I was 18. I was so excited. On the first night my mum came and saw it and she ended up taking the director aside and giving him 20 minutes of notes on how he could improve the show. I think that was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life."

Talent aside, she must have been pretty driven to get a role in Romeo and Juliet at the Globe at the tender age of 18. Yet soon after that, Kendrick took a step back from acting to study English literature at Cambridge. That's because, she says, literature was something she loved even before acting. She writes a little herself, has even had work performed at the Royal Court and has now made a short film. In the event, Cambridge then seems as much a part of the package as appearing at the Globe. "I was lucky in that I had already started my career by that time and I was with supportive agents who got me TV jobs in my holidays. It worked out really well."

Indeed. Conscious of the advantages and privileges she's enjoyed, Kendrick is au fait with the argument that the British acting profession is currently top-heavy with public school kids and the opportunities for newbie actors from a working-class background are diminishing.

"With drama school fees being so high, tuition fees going up ... There is a trend for this upper-class period drama kind of thing which is fine," she says. "But more and more now, people seem to think you have to be the part in order to get it. So only upper-class actors are being cast in those roles.

"I agree it's an unsettling trend. I'm part of an organisation called Arts Emergency." They were set up after the Conservatives were re-elected last time around by the comedian, Josie Long. "Basically, it's a fantastic organisation that is aimed at creating an alternative old boys' network for young people from underprivileged schools and low-income backgrounds to get into the arts."

Kendrick is herself mentoring a young actress. It's the least she can do, she argues. "I hope more things like it pop up because it does feel like quite an urgent need to broaden the pool of actors that the United Kingdom is producing because we'll really get ourselves in a fix if only people who have gone to public school – of which I myself am one I must freely admit."

Diversity, she believes, is crucial: "If we only have public school actors playing all the roles we're going to end up with boring drama."

Now, that would be a boring birthday gift.

The world premiere of Whisky Galore! takes place at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh on June 26 at 5.15pm as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Visit edfilmfest.org.uk for details.

The Sunday Herald is the festival's media partner