Claire Danes in Stardust David James/Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

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Platinum hair falls down the back of Claire Danes's shimmering ice blue dress. Bright blonde brows frame her eyes, and a glittering stone the size of a small apple hangs around her neck. There is something undeniably celestial about her.She also happens to be astride a unicorn.

"Well," says Danes, with all the nonchalance someone mounted on a mythical creature can muster. "I play a star who crashes to earth. There are many different, coexisting story lines, but everybody in those story lines is in pursuit of this star for different reasons."

Danes's heavenly body–in–human form Yvaine is at the heart of Paramount Pictures's celebrity-filled adaptation of Neil Gaiman's novel Stardust, a fairy tale that follows the adventures of the innocent and gullible teenager Tristan Thorn as he leaves behind the sanctuary of his English countryside town and sets out to fulfill a promise to retrieve the fallen star. The girl with whom he is in love has promised her hand in marriage to him, should he bring it to her. ("That," scoffs Danes, "was a ridiculous negotiation.") And Tristan is not the only one on Yvaine's trail.

"I'm knocked out of the sky by a necklace that had been owned by the king," Danes explains. "And just before he died, he threw it upwards and unintentionally impaled me and caused me to crash to earth. And so the sons of that king are in pursuit of that stone in that necklace because whoever claims it first is king."

As if a lovesick boy and a couple of power-hungry ignoble princes weren't enough, a dark witch pursues the prize traveling in a small cart drawn by two billy goats.

"The evil witch is wanting to eat my heart because the hearts of stars provide everlasting youth. So anyway, so everybody's trying to kidnap me," Danes says. Clear enough?

Stardust has been described as The Princess Bride meets Midnight Run, a seemingly preposterous assessment that Danes surprisingly endorses: "The premise," she says, "is very similar [to Midnight Run]. Two people are forced against their will to spend time together. They hate each other. It's adversarial, and then, over time, they actually grow to appreciate each other."