It’s been hard to avoid Andrea Riseborough on the big screen this year. The 31 year-old British actress, who first gained notice in this country in Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky” and Madonna’s “W.E.”,  has had four films released in the space of two months — “Oblivion,” “Welcome to the Punch,” “Disconnect” and the new IRA thriller “Shadow Dancer.”

She is, in film biz parlance, a “comer,” which noted film blogger Jeffrey Wells (Hollywood-elsewhere.com) describes as “one level down from industry star and one or two levels down from being a name among ticket buyers.”

“Every job is a milestone,” Riseborough says, fresh from the New York set of  Alejandro González Iñárritu’s all-star comedy, “Birdman.” “That first chance to work with Mike Leigh, or just taking a day of work in a Roger Michell movie (“Venus”), joining ‘Birdman’ to work with Innuritu, I’m adding up the milestones, the steps along the path. An actor’s career is always a work in progress, nothing that you should ever let yourself get caught up in as it’s happening.”

Riseborough, having cut her teeth working with the improvisational Leigh, is a writer as well as actress. But when documentary filmmaker James Marsh (“Man on Wire”) pitched her the fictional feature “Shadow Dancer,” which has her playing a damaged, dedicated IRA member in 1990s Belfast whom British agent Clive Owen sets out to “turn,” the writer in her became an eraser.

“I was unclear about who Collette was, because in the original script, she talks an awful lot. Too much, I thought. I had a grasp of the situation she was in but not the person that she was. I think I took the role just to figure out who she was. If I didn’t commit to the film, I’d never do the research and I’d never figure her out.”

Her research made her realize “she should speak less and less and do more with her eyes. In that part of the world, even now, people are very economical with their words. They lived in a very dangerous and paranoid place for a very long time. Her silences give her an authenticity. People didn’t talk. Talking could get you killed.”

The native of Whitley Bay, Northumberland, pauses thoughtfully to consider every question. She describes her parents as “Thatcherites,” implying that she doesn’t share those politics. Working with the working class leftist Leigh, taking a role in the historical union drama “Made in Dagenham” and making “Shadow Dancer” gives one the idea that politics play at least a small role in her choices. 

“I believe that everyone who lived through that era in Northern Ireland was trapped by their circumstances,” she says. “They could just be pragmatic about it. They had very little choice, or so they felt. They were at the mercy of an ever-present occupying collective that would find them. That creates a fear that you live with.”

With cop thrillers, science fiction, period piece dramas and contemporary dramas on her resume and a quartet of projects at various stages of completion, one credit that stands out is “Birdman,” a comedy about a washed up screen superhero who stages a Broadway show to make his comeback. Emma Stone, Zach Galifianakis and ex-screen superheroes Edward Norton (“The Incredible Hulk”) and Michael “Batman” Keaton also star. Can Riseborough hold her own in a comedy?

“Oh, I’ve been doing comedy since I was, what, nine? I did “Magicians” (2007). Well, that didn’t work as well as it should have, but it was supposed to be a comedy.”

Riseborough has moved from Britain to Idaho to be at least a little closer to work in Hollywood. And the roles are piling up. She is “obviously talented and kind of Streepy on a certain level,” Hollywood-elsewhere’s Wells says. “The right role — the one that puts her over — hasn’t happened yet.”

But with all this work out there and all the work to come, “she’s obviously going to go to some very interesting places” in her career within the next few years.