She shot to fame as Lucy Pevensie in the film adaptation of CS Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe but Georgie Henley — now 22 years old — has revealed she was “bullied mercilessly” by her school peers during filming of the Narnia trilogy.

The success, Georgie said, had a toll on her education because she “didn’t have the confidence” to be proud of her work. “I loved the work side of school, I loved learning, but the social side was a minefield. And part of that was worsened by the films that I had done, by me being in and out of school. There is such a pressure of child stars not to admit that it’s hard. To smile and say ‘yeah, I love my double life’, and pretend they are a special agent or something.

“... I was bullied mercilessly; people were so awful to me at school. It was amazing getting to university and people being, like, ‘That’s so cool!’ And I was, like ‘I know, right?’ So I wish I could say to the 13-year-old me, ‘Be proud of what you’ve accomplished’. And that doesn’t mean being arrogant. They are not the same. I think I conflated the two things,” the actress told The Times.

Following the three Narnia films, including Prince Caspian (2008) and Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010), Georgie was offered a number of other roles, but she is looking for challenging projects. “Some child actors grow up and their career gets quite calculated. Their agents say, ‘you can do an indie film, then you have got to do a blockbuster, and then you can do two more indies’, but I’m just looking for stuff that scares me and challenges me.”