When Mary Nighy was a young actor, an unhealthy number of scripts landed in her inbox featuring a character that went something like: “18-year-old-girl, naked, dead.” “Sexual abuse or violence is often just used as a plot device. It’s a catalyst for drama,” she says. “It doesn’t really tell you much about the experience of being abused. Or how you emerge from it.”

Now, with her first feature film as a director, she has made a film that does exactly that: exploring what it might feel like to be trapped inside a coercive, controlling and psychologically abusive relationship. Alice, Darling is the story of an accidental intervention, after three female friends drive from Toronto to a cottage to celebrate a 30th birthday. One of the trio, Alice (Anna Kendrick) is in a relationship with Simon, a successful artist. He seems nice enough, but something about him feels off.

“He doesn’t hit me, though,” Alice protests, defensively, when the penny drops for her friends as to the extent of his controlling behaviour. No, he doesn’t hit her. The abuse is subtle and devastating: he isolates Alice from her friends, monitors her emails, belittles her.

As a portrait of coercive control, the film is horribly believable. Still, one of the things I liked most about it is how little screen time Simon gets. Nighy nods. “He is not the focus,” she says firmly. “He is not the protagonist. We didn’t want that. Instead, the film focuses on Anna, what it must be like to live with cortisol levels constantly through the roof, feeling under threat.”

Nighy doesn’t have first-hand experience of coercive control. But in her first conversation with Kendrick – a two-hour chat over Zoom during the pandemic – the actor revealed that she had been in an emotionally and psychologically abusive relationship. So one of Nighy’s biggest concerns became creating a protective workspace for Kendrick, and other members of the cast and crew affected, “trying to be aware of that for her, making it a supportive environment”.

Nighy is eloquent and quietly confident. We meet in a cafe in east London close to where we both live. Before I switch the tape recorder on, we make small talk about the local swimming pool, where her two young daughters have had lessons – my daughter too. She is warm and chatty; it’s the kind of conversation you’d have with a parent at a playdate. There is absolutely nothing to suggest she is acting royalty.

Nighy, 38, was born and raised in London, the only child of the actors Diana Quick and Bill Nighy; the couple split in 2008 after 27 years together. When she was little it was her mother who was the breadwinner – and her most famous parent, thanks to her portrayal of Julia Flyte in the 1980s TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. For years, Nighy had boys of a bookish persuasion coming up to her to talk about her mum. “Even at university, men would say how they were fans of my mum, or had a poster of her up on their wall or whatever.” She grins.

For her father, fame came later in life. It was lovely, she says, watching his success following Love Actually in 2003. “He’d worked for so many years, with so many good people, and was really owning it by the time it all came together.”

Bill was in the audience at the premiere of Alice, Darling at the Toronto film festival last year. In a recent Vogue interview he confessed proudly to reading all the reviews at Toronto. “Oh God!” says Nighy, mock-appalled. “He kept that quiet. I didn’t know that!” There’s now talk of the two of them working together.

We met the week of peak interest in “nepo babies”. What has been driving people nuts on Twitter is how so many kids of celebrity families are oblivious to their privilege. Nighy isn’t one of them. “I get it. I’m hugely lucky to have the access, the education,” she says. “Every job as an actor I had to audition for. There are a lot of jobs I didn’t get.”

But she often thinks about the cultural capital of growing up in her house, and the training it gave her. “Sometimes my parents didn’t have childcare. I would be in a rehearsal room watching Matthew Warchus direct my mum. That’s an amazing education. There’s stuff you accrue without realising it.”

Plus, she adds, there is a huge benefit to having parents who get it. Her grandmother’s response, when her father announced he wanted to be an actor, was: “Is he gay?”

That said, when she was growing up, neither of her parents encouraged her to follow in their footsteps. Nighy wonders if that might be partly because of her mother’s own grim experiences as a young woman in the film industry. She remembers being in the car with Quick when she was in her late teens or early 20s, listening to the stories. “It took my breath away, the objectification of her body. She was very matter-of-fact telling me all this. I felt like crying, I couldn’t bear it. That’s my privilege, in a way, of being a younger generation.”

She pauses, formulating the thought. “Sexism and misogyny are still there. The patriarchy exists. But the level of it, how explicit it was in the 60s, 70s and 80s … it was …” She trails off, arms gesturing at the scale.

Nighy did not have any terrible experience as a young actor. But she found it depressing, being judged by her looks. “It felt like that wasn’t the most interesting aspect of who I was. That was a big part of why, very early, I wanted to direct.”

When she was 21, during her final year studying English at University College London, she landed a part in Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette. Watching Coppola in action on set was a revelation. “She was so quiet and prepared. A lot of the male directors I’d worked with were big presences. They were quite loud, needed attention. It was so exciting to see someone who didn’t feel the need to be anything except herself.”

Nighy wrote her first short on the set of Marie Antoinette, and in her mid-20s put in two years at the National Film and Television School. “I wanted to have the confidence that came with a good solid training.”

Before she flew out to Canada to make Alice, Darling, she picked up a good tip for directing from Autumn de Wilde, who made the 2020 Jane Austen adaptation of Emma. De Wilde’s advice was to channel Mary Poppins. Nighy talks me through it: “On the first day, calmly and gently lay out your house rules. If anything goes wrong, don’t scream or shout. Just firmly and clearly explain that this is not the way to behave: we don’t do that in our house. It’s a brilliant analogy.”

She values emotional intelligence. “I’m always interested in how you can have authority without being dictatorial or ultra-macho. It does have parallels with children. How do you have authority with your kids? Not by screaming at them.”

So, is being a parent good training for directing? Nighy nods. “I think there are many ways to be a director. But my career coincided in a way with having children, and becoming a mother gave me a lot of confidence. That was quite useful when it came to directing – it was very empowering.” She pauses and adds finally, with a grin: “Not that I want to mother everyone on set.”

• Alice, Darling is released on 20 January