Apart from a brief early sequence in Australia the film is entirely set in Dhaka, Bangladesh, though the city was mostly re-created in Kolkata, India – a perfect fit given its large Bengali community; filming also took place in Ahmedabad, India. Hargrave shot for two weeks with a small team in Dhaka. The production then moved on to Thailand, where the quieter scenes, including Farahani’s, were shot, as was the film’s finale, an epic gun battle over a bridge.

Hemsworth plays an Australian black ops mercenary, Tyler Rake, who attempts to rescue Ovi (14 year-old Rudhraksh Jaiswal), the kidnapped son of an imprisoned drug lord. Farahani’s character Nik Khan hires Rake, with whom she has a past, for the job.

“I’m an arms dealer and Chris and I are ultimately working together on the same team,” she explains. “They’re like pirates. There are bad bad guys and good bad guys in the movie. Everybody’s bad, but we’re the good bad guys.

“It’s a big-budget action movie with lots of shooting and killing and killing and killing. There’s a lot of killing in big-budget action movies, but this one is also funny.”

Hemsworth’s character, Rake, is a bit soft for a warrior, I suggest. “Oh, Tyler has his weak points, he cannot leave this boy behind basically,” Farahani says, rallying to his defence. “He has a soft spot for this boy after something happened to his own kid.”

Farahani had never met Hemsworth, even if she had spent considerable time in Byron Bay, where Hemsworth lives with his wife and three children, while filming on Australia’s Gold Coast for the role of a sea witch with tattooed bald head in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales .

“I was bored and everyone was telling me, ‘You have to go to Byron Bay’,” she recalls. “Joel Edgerton is my very good friend; we’d made Exodus together and I emailed him and he said his friend was living there. So I emailed Christos [Christos Dorje Walker] and he suggested a few places, or he said I could come to his house. So I stayed with him because I was fed up with hotels. Five days later we got married.”

While the marriage has since ended – she says Walker grew tired of all the travelling involved with her work – she has maintained a friendship with champion surfer Dave Rastovich and his partner, Lauren Hill, who live next door to Hemsworth.

“They were talking about him and I didn’t know him at all,” she recalls. “When this movie came up, I realised this Chris is probably the same Australian actor. So when I told Chris that I know Dave his mind was blown, because what are the chances?”

Farahani divides her time between Portugal and Ibiza in Spain, and loves chilling out in the countryside. “Everything in this world is going bad, but as much as the darkness is getting darker you have to follow the light,” she says philosophically.

A French citizen, she appears regularly in French films; she cannot return to Iran, where she had been, and still is, a major star. She played the leading role in her first movie, The Pear Tree, when she was only 14.

The daughter of Iranian theatre director and actor Behzad Farahani, she initially wanted to study music, but soon decided to stick with cinema.

“I did many films in Iran and when I was about 23 years old I was contacted to do Body of Lies with Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio. It was quite a shock. I did it on a dare really.

“When I returned to Iran I was submitted to much interrogation, as working with Americans was completely forbidden. I made another Iranian film, About Elly, and left Iran afterwards through sheer luck.”

Having missed out on Hollywood films, she headed for Los Angeles. But she did not fit in there. “I was being suffocated in Los Angeles, with all the billboards, the happy life where the sun is shining every day. As Jim [Jarmusch] says in his films, it’s like Zombietown. I hated it.

“I love Europe. I think Europe is a blessing, the beauty, the culture and the variety of people. So I went back to France and it felt right. What country would have been better than France to adopt me? I’m only French now [and have been] for more than 11 years. I don’t carry a Persian passport.”

Even if she sees her family outside Iran, she still misses her homeland. “l have this constant pain; it’s like my force. Exile became me; I became my own home. Now I don’t feel at home anywhere. Home is gone, but at the same time it’s everywhere.”

Farahani would love to do a comedy. “Ridley Scott told me I have to do a comedy one day. I have an ocean of tragedy in me but there’s also an ocean of comedy that hasn’t been tapped. I’ve made some lighter films – Arab Blues, My Sweet Pepper Land and Paterson – so I’ve already managed to emancipate myself from these grim parts. When I get offered parts with misery and mud I say, ‘I’ve had enough of that’.”

She would gladly work again with Netflix after enjoying the experience on Extraction. “Netflix is so cosmopolitan, everyone is from somewhere [different] and I never felt this way on American movies. It was like a world family, it was epic and the Netflix people are so young, so open. I loved it.”

Extraction starts streaming on Netflix from April 24.