Natalie Dormer is on a pool terrace overlooking Los Angeles, doing what can only be described as the happy dance. In an entertainment world where things so often go wrong, everything appears to be going exactly right for Dormer, and you sense her good fortune as she casually pirouettes and pliés—she was a ballerina before becoming an actor—for a photographer’s camera on this sparkling-blue day in Beverly Hotels.

But then she stops, cocks her hip, and scrunches her lips into a mischievous little pucker that edges up on one side. Dormer has very large, bright blue eyes that somehow loom larger in that instant. The English actress is so well known for this facial fourish that there is a highly traffcked Tumblr page called “Natalie Dormer’s Smirk.” For the record, she is okay with that. “I have a lopsided smile; what can I say?” she says, when I ask about it later. “And if that message flters down to some girl looking in the mirror who feels she’s not completely symmetrical, then I am glad to have helped in some small, albeit ridiculous, way.”