So she put out the word to her Hollywood representatives: “I really want to do an Angelina Jolie-type character,” Ms. Moretz said recently. “You know, like an action hero, woman empowerment, awesome, take-charge leading role.”
A month later she got her wish when she was offered a part in the adventure film “Kick-Ass” as Hit Girl, a mysterious vigilante who leaves a trail of bullet casings and body parts wherever she goes.
“My mom was like, ‘It’s exactly what you’ve been wanting to do,’ ” said Ms. Moretz, who was 11 years old then. (She’s 13 now.)
The movie, which opens on Friday, is the director Matthew Vaughn’s violent and foul-mouthed satire about aspiring crime fighters who use traditional weapons to compensate for their lack of superhuman powers. While its maladroit title character (played by Aaron Johnson) learns the heroic ropes, it is Ms. Moretz, clad in a purple wig and matching pleated skirt and wielding a mean double-edged blade, who usually utters the foulest language and perpetrates the most gruesome acts of brutality in the film.
For anyone unfamiliar with the “Kick-Ass” comics series (written by Mark Millar, who also wrote the comics version of “Wanted”), Hit Girl has been the movie’s most persuasive ambassador: the Internet went wild this winter for an R-rated trailer in which Ms. Moretz enunciates an obscene word that little girls are definitely not supposed to say, right before she slices and dices her way through a room full of drug dealers.
But Ms. Moretz and her character raise a recurring question about what limits, if any, should be placed on young actors involved in adult storytelling, and to what extent these performers understand the roles that they are playing. For some critics Ms. Moretz’s performance is stirring the same discomfort they felt when a 13-year-old Natalie Portman strutted her stuff for the ruthless hitman played by Jean Reno in “The Professional.”
Mr. Vaughn, who previously directed the crime drama “Layer Cake” and the fantasy “Stardust,” and who wrote the screenplay for “Kick-Ass” with Jane Goldman, described Hit Girl as one half of “the ultimate father-daughter relationship, where Barbie dolls are replaced with knives, and unicorns become hand grenades.”
Raised by her father (played by Nicolas Cage) to be “a fully trained, brainwashed assassin,” Mr. Vaughn said, “she is not normal, and therefore the rules that apply to other people do not apply to her.”
In seeking a young actress who can be both sugar and spikes, it is not hard to see why the makers of the movie would gravitate to Ms. Moretz. On a visit to New York last month, lounging in a private suite at a boutique hotel in Manhattan with her brother Trevor, 23, Ms. Moretz had no trouble acting her age, fiddling with a bottle of designer water or spontaneously singing a chorus from Lady Gaga’s “Dance in the Dark.” (“This is Chloë after dark,” she explained.)
But when discussing her career she assumed the sophistication of an actress twice her age. Each film she appears in, Ms. Moretz said, “sets a new brick in my acting wall.”
“The more bricks I have, the better I am at acting,” she said.
She has built that wall quickly with movies like “(500) Days of Summer,” in which she played Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s precocious younger sister, and the 2005 remake of “The Amityville Horror.” She has hazier memories of other early roles, booked when she moved with her parents and four brothers to Los Angeles for her father’s plastic surgery practice. “I was so tiny,” she said. “I was a little 6-year-old.”
Trevor Moretz, who is also Chloë’s acting coach, and her mother, Teri, read all the scripts she is sent by her agents, and try to balance her grown-up fare with family-friendly movies (like the recent hit “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”). When “Kick-Ass” arrived, the Moretzes felt it was a showcase for Chloë’s grit and athleticism; they recognized its harsher aspects too but believed she was up for the challenge.
“Being the youngest of five children,” Teri Moretz wrote in an e-mail message, her daughter “has a very well-rounded view of the world.” She added: “It definitely pushes boundaries, but Chloë knows the things that Hit Girl says and does are fictional.”
For Chloë herself, Hit Girl was an opportunity to keep pace with her cinematic idols, to do something “no other kid had done except for Natalie Portman in ‘Léon,’ ” she said, using the European title for “The Professional.”
Not that Ms. Moretz knows that Luc Besson film firsthand. “I haven’t even seen it now,” she said glumly. “I’m not allowed.”
Nor had she seen many of the performances that Trevor regarded as Hit Girl’s antecedents, including Ms. Jolie in “Wanted” and Jodie Foster in “Taxi Driver.” She was, however, given a special dispensation to watch Uma Thurman in the “Kill Bill” movies. “It was hilarious,” Ms. Moretz said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m killing people with real blood.’ It’s fake.”
Before filming on “Kick-Ass” began, Ms. Moretz spent several months in Los Angeles, London and Toronto training in gymnastics, body conditioning and weapons safety. (“Always check your gun when someone gives it to you,” she said. “Make sure it’s a fake bullet.”)
During the six-month shoot she was also told time and again by her mother, her brother and her director that Hit Girl, and not Chloë, was the one swearing and shooting at villains. The lesson seems to have sunk in. “When they call cut, I leave it behind,” Ms. Moretz said. “You should see me after a crying scene.”
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