RHONA Mitra arrives for the interview fresh from the dentist, still recovering from a healthy injection of Novocaine. Twenty minutes ago she was mumbling and dribbling, now tears are running down her face. But she's not unhappy, it's just the wind on the café roof terrace making her eyes water. 
Dressed in army combats and a thick camouflage jacket, she looks like she's quite happily storm an embassy you pointed her at. It's not what you'd expect, but then Rhona's sex-kitten media image doesn't do justice to the real Rhona. 
She agrees that she's a bit of a tomboy. "Yeah. I'm not really a girlie. I can be once in a while, but then I tend to fall off the heels," she laughs. "I do paint my nails, though. I think I've been portrayed as a bit more sex-kitteny than I am. I'm quite a smurf really. I revert back to being very immature a lot." 
The image of the career girl planning her way to fame soon dissolves as you realise that 22-year-old Rhona is only here because it's fun. She's done a stint  as the human face of Lara Croft, the Tomb Raider girl, and now she's presenting the Pepsi Chart show on Channel 5, but it's all come about just because it seemed like a good idea at the time. 
She's lived through dark, druggy years on the London club scene and come out the other side with a determination to have fun on her terms, doing the things she wants to do. 
A lot of the sex kitten image came from the classic tabloid story in the Sun. The story claimed that Rhona's father - a prominent cosmetic surgeon - had done Rhona's boob job for her. "It was an absolute load of rubbish, but I eventually traced it back to where it came from. I was speaking to this girl in the toilets of  a night club. She'd been admiring my boobs and I said if she wanted to she should go right ahead and get a boob job done. It was only later I found out she was a friend of Andy Coulson who used to write the Sun's showbiz column." 
But why bother getting them done in the first place ? "We had this Australian girl staying with us when I was a kid and my mum used to say what great tits she had, and I thought, yeah, I'm going to have great tits when I'm older, too. But when I did get older they just never arrived, so I decided that I should go out and get myself some anyway." 
The Sun story may have been nonsense, but Rhona's figure is always worth a few column inches. She's shorter than you'd expect, but no less stunning for it. Her dark skin and sharp good looks remind you that her father is half-Indian, but her feisty self-belief definitely comes from her Irish mother. Her drinking habits, though, seem to be the result of her London upbringing: "I'm a larger drinker. I'm quite a stupid larger drinker," she grins. "I do like my larger, and …" she pauses. "Mashed potatoes." 
Becoming the living embodiment of Lara Croft brought out that  feisty side of Rhona developed an ill-deserved reputation for being hard to work with. While she seems a little embarrassed at the memory, she insists it was for all the best reasons. "I did give them a hard time. I said: "I'm not doing that, I'm not doing that, and I'm not doing that !" she says, gesticulating. "I was really determined that I would not crucify the name and the image of Lara Croft." Rhona, it seems, just found the tits and arse stuff too obvious. She says she wanted to do something deeper, and (seriously) always saw the levels of the game like the levels you go through in life. Like, heavy, man. 
Born in Paddington, Rhona left London for a Catholic boarding school education in the country. "It was my choice; I wanted to go out and experience the fields." On leaving, she returned to the capital with no real plans. What followed was four years of serious partying. "Between '89 and '93 I was a  wild child, a real nutter." She took odd jobs to keep her head above water, and, for a while, worked in the cloakroom at Brown's nightclub. 
"They were long, shitty hours," she recalls. "As  you'd expect, we had loads of celebrities in. Robert Downey Jr used to come in when he was filming Chaplin  in London, and he's say to me: "You speak English so beautifully, can you say these lines for me ?' He'd tell me his lines and I'd say them back, and we'd be sitting there as I took him through his lines." 
An ex-boyfriend of Rhona's also used to run the VIP room at the Ministry of Sound when it first opened:  "I was down there a lot. I was always really into the music rather than the scene. Sometimes I'd just sit there with a friend of mine and we'd  listen to the DJs. We'd listen to the way they could bring people's emotions up and down just by mixing records in, like it was a finely composed piece of music. I used to go to raves like Raindance, but I was never into the whistles and white gloves. I mean, you can stick five pills down your neck for a weekend but what do you get out of it ?" 
By her won admission she flipped out for a couple of years - "I was a complete loon, but I don't regret a bit of it" - but eventually the clubbing and the drugs started to take their toll. Now it's not something that she's keen to go back to. 
"I got it out of my system fairly early, when, thank God, the clubs were actually quite good. It was great when everything was starting out. There were new DJs, it was new music, and we'd just got over the Madchester thing. Everyone was really into it and genuinely having a good time. I got out of it when it all started diluting, which was probably a good time. From what I've heard the clubs now they've changed a lot; besides, I'm much more into being able to get up the morning and go paintballing or go-karting and have a clear head on my shoulder. Every once in a while I will go  down to the Blue Note because I really like good drum'n'bass, or I'll go to Bar Rhumba. But mostly I'm big into having loads of people round and cooking fat meals and drinking loads of red wine." 
So does she indulge in drugs anymore ? "No." Definitely not. I don't hang around people or situations where … hang on, that's actually a load of bollocks. I mean, the whole industry is like…" she trails off. "I like my larger," she laughs. "Getting pissed as  much more fun." But she still smokes the odd spliff, no ? "No comment," she says, grinning. But her stories of turtle sanctuaries and nudist beaches in Mexico seemed to owe more than a little to the local weed. 
When she got out of the club scene Rhona enrolled in a three-year course at drama school which, she says, gave her a lot of self-discipline. But she left after one year when she thought she'd learned enough. 
Right now, Rhona is in the early stages of her acting career and fame is coming slowly but surely. She had groupies, but isn't yet often recognised in the street. She's also wary of  giving away too much and becoming a personality - something she feels could compromise her acting. 
For the meantime, though, the Pepsi Chart Show is proving a real laugh - "It's like babies-make-TV." She recently met Robbie Williams on the show and discovered they shared a passion. "The first time I met Robbie I was really pissed off because I'd just lost my Darth Vader watch and I'm a huge Star Wars fan. So when I was introduced I was like: 'Oh, right. Hi.' He asked me what was up  and I told him I'd lost my Darth Vader watch. He said: 'No way! That's awful!' He's a big Star Wars fan, too." 
On the day of the Ministry photo shoot, Rhona turned up brandishing a huge, green plastic light sabre, much to everyone's surprise. It's a prop, however, that seems made for her and you can't help thinking she was criminally over-looked for the new Star Wars movie. 
Rhona and Robbie almost had a lot more in common. It's not well known, but Rhona co-wrote and recorded an album with Dave Stewart when she was playing Lara Croft. Bizarrely, the album was recorded during two weeks up the Amazon. "I was pinching myself the whole time, it was the most bonkers thing ever. One minute I was doing a play in Battersea Arts Centre and the next I was on a boat up the Amazon with this rock god, both of us with feathers on our heads, writing mad songs and drinking rum." A pop career doesn't appeal, though. "I think there are just too many people getting signed without great music and they haven't got a passion for it, and that's wrong." 
Acting is still her first passion and recently she's been working on the forthcoming film Beowulf with Christopher Lambert in Romania. "Everyone said to me don't do it, don't go. It'll be a nightmare. And it was !" she screams. "Romania is a hell-hole." 
Previous film shoots have been a bit more fun and Rhona enthuses about working in the Tunisian desert where some of the original Star Wars was filmed. Screen offers continue to roll in and, with a higher profile, the parts are getting more interesting. "I've got another film that I'm doing in a couple of months' time, but I can't talk about it until it's all signed, sealed and delivered. It's big, though, and it's weird. I'm very excited." 
Rhona lives with her cat Smaug, and boyfriend Sacha - a professional musician and producer - in Primrose Hill in London. She confesses she's very much in love. "he composes songs for me, kind of funky soul stuff. I see him playing amazing things on the piano and just go, ooh! 
There's nothing particularly physical that I find attractive in a man. It's men with a passion for something that I find attractive. Generally, I don't think I'm particularly sexual, no more than anyone else, though I am very creative. When I was on my own in a hotel room in Romania. I had the imagination to keep myself occupied," she says with a coy smile. 
She might not consider herself very sexual, but she's certainly very sexy. At the photoshoot she's at her cutest when she's relaxed and having a laugh - thrusting her hands down the front of her trousers and shifting her hipsters down bit by bit until you get a glimpse of her underwear. And on the subject of underwear, Rhona manages to throw another curve ball. "I wear G-strings usually, but I've got into wearing Day of the Week pants.. or none at all!" she laughs. 
"Actually, I collect pants ! I frame them. Tacky marketplaces on holiday always seem to have these leopard-skin pants that are really raunchy but really tiny, like they're for a two-year-old. Well, I collect them from all over the world and I put them in frames with glittery backgrounds." Right. Are there any other bizarre hobbies we should know about ? 
"I go sky-diving. It's not for the adrenaline buzz, it's more a will-power thing. I was interested to see how much fear I would have and, er, it's not a lot actually. I got quite bored when I was hanging in the air. I want to do it without a parachute next."