Helen Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, in "Alice in Wonderland."

LOS ANGELES — In Sweeney Todd, Tim Burton had Helena Bonham Carter tossed into an oven. Before that, he cast her as a rotting cadaver (Corpse Bride) and as gnarled one-eyed witch (Big Fish).

And you thought you had relationship scars.

Then again, given his love of the macabre, surely this is a sign of affection. Remember, sparks first flew between them while she was ensconced in a monkey mask for Planet of the Apes.

“He likes to put makeup on me. He likes to deform me,” a droll, characteristically disheveled Bonham Carter says of her personal and professional partner. “I love it. I always like looking as different as I can.”

So while some couples role play, they just go to work. Their latest collaboration? Her volcanic performance as the bulbous, sadistic Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland.

Opening nationally on Friday, the film picks up a decade following the events of the Lewis Carroll books — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass — with a now 19-year-old Alice (Australian actress Mia Wasikowska) plummeting back down the rabbit hole into the otherworldly kingdom of “Underland,” as it’s called.

Asked why she landed the job of the film’s deranged villain, Bonham Carter deadpans, “I’m one of the few actresses who can blow up their head.”

Albeit, she notes, with an assist from make-up artists and special-effects technicians.

“They had to get rid of my hairline so they put a bald cap on and that takes two and half hours, and then they have to paint it, and then they have to put my beauty makeup on — that took some time — and then my huge wig.”

From there, she performed largely opposite non-existent characters and settings that would later be rendered in digitally.

“I had this huge camera dedicated to me, which was fine by me,” she says. “When you’re acting, you kind of have to imagine anyway.”

By contrast, the movie itself leaves little to the imagination, spilling over with phantasmagorical dreamscapes, fearsome creatures, harrowing chases and violent clashes to the death. Despite this, Bonham Carter — who has two children, ages six and two, with Burton — isn’t concerned the film might prove too intense for youngsters.

“Tim has a theory that it’s us who have got the problem — that we impose fears on our kids and the kids are actually quite robust.”

In addition to the Red Queen, the cast of delirious, sometimes diabolical denizens includes the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit, Johnny Depp’s carrot-coifed Mad Hatter and Anne Hathaway’s regal, wholesome White Queen. Well, actually, not so wholesome, as Hathaway will tell you.

“One of the most fun parts of my character came from this conversation Tim and I had,” she says. “He told me, ‘In Wonderland, I don’t want anything to be all good or all bad. I don’t want it to be the Red Queen’s the bad one and you’re the nice benevolent one who’s all good.’ So he said to have fun exploring the relationship between the two of them — they come from the same place.

“So I thought, ‘How fun if my character has some sort of hidden psychosis and is interested in knives and things like that? Is adorable on the outside and is trying to become this very positive creature, but underneath she has a murderous streak?’ ”

Ultimately, she drew from numerous, unlikely sources — from punk rock music, to veganism, to cinema icon Greta Garbo. “I still think no one has ever moved on film quite like she did,” Hathaway says of Garbo. “Her whole body looks like it’s breathing.”

Presumably, Hathaway could have lobbied for the starring role of Alice. Burton, however, wanted an unknown, eventually settling on Wasikowska. And it turned out, Hathaway preferred the White Queen anyway.

“I would have played a mushroom, if that’s the way Tim saw me in it ... I would have just done anything to be in Wonderland. But it’s kind of nice to be a real person.”

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