Amy's full of some Smart stuff

10 April 2012

'It's better than being Amy Not So Smart,' surmises Hollywood's latest blonde bombshell, who in 2002 will become Amy Not So Unknown. Smart is indeed well-christened - she's also a real blonde California girl who knows she's on the brink of stardom but has been doing little to shepherd it in this new year.

'I'm actually lying low for a while,' confesses this self-effacing 25-year-old in a conspiratorial tone, knowing perhaps that her Hollywood team might prefer its girl-on-the-verge to be working. 'I really don't want to continue doing teen comedies,' she offers by way of explanation, as if she's made a string of duds in the genre. In fact, she starred in one of the best, Road Trip, but predictably wants to 'wait for the right thing now'.

She could not, though, resist the lure of Rat Race, directed by American comedy vet Jerry Zucker and also starring 'really seasoned comedians like John Cleese, Rowan Atkinson and Whoopi Goldberg. She's my favourite. I've always loved her work and found her to be one of the funniest women alive. Working with her was such a blessing.'

What else made Rat Race a right thing? 'Well, it's not exactly a teen comedy. It obviously has more in common with films like It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, although I think our film is funnier. And I love this character. She's confident, alive and a really nice girl with a vicious temper.'

Her character Tracy Faucet is also a helicopter pilot who spends most of the film entangled - though not romantically - with the object of her affection in Road Trip, Breckin Meyer. 'This was much more exciting for us than Road Trip, though. We had more scenes together and didn't have to go through that "getting to know each other and finding out what makes us tick" thing. We just naturally got along so well in Road Trip, this time we were able to jump right in and have the best time with it. Being a female in films like that, you always play the girlfriend but this time we're more buddies so I liked that.'

Do the pair's off-screen paramours get jealous of their crackling chemistry? 'Oh, they're used to it. Breckin went to high school with my boyfriend Brandon [Williams, the pair have been dating for six years] and his partner directed my boyfriend in Can't Hardly Wait.'

Most exciting of all, though, Smart took helicopter flying lessons. 'Like I'm going to play a helicopter pilot and not take lessons! I had the controls sometimes - but I wasn't flying it for the crazy chase scenes.'

Rat Race runs amok with crazy chase scenes and crazy other scenes. And Smart lapped it all up. 'I enjoyed this kind of classic comedy. I mean, I love films like Airplane! That's my favourite Jerry Zucker film. And I loved working for him. He pays attention to detail and wants to bring out the best in everyone. I felt so encouraged to bring out my best.'

While 'resting' as an actress, Smart says she's 'trying to cook. It doesn't always turn out great but I enjoy it. I bike ride, do Kundalini yoga and play with my cats, Yogi and Nala.' She probably does not check out her multitudinous shrine-like websites, most of which feature pictures of her topless in Road Trip. 'I have no regrets about that. The scene lent itself to the character. When we're intimate with someone in life, we normally take our clothes off. Not to undress in Road Trip would have been faking it.'

There seems little fake about Smart, who never even planned on becoming an actress. She was born in LA's bohemian Topanga Canyon, in the hills above Malibu, and remains passionate about those surroundings. She's a spokesperson for Heal The Bay, a charity devoted to cleaning up the Californian coastline, but spent ten years of her life dreaming of becoming a ballerina rather than a Baywatch babe. 'I never thought about acting but one of my best friends did and I used to watch her go off and do films. That sparked my interest.'

Though she was a tomboy as a child, and the only girl on her Little League baseball team, she also worked as a model from the age of 13 and was soon treading the catwalk in Milan. She returned home aged 17 and promptly won her first acting job as a model in MTV's Rock The Vote series of advertisements aimed at encouraging America's eligible teenagers to use their vote. From then on she took a string of tiny roles in films with correspondingly tiny audiences - How To Make The Cruelest Month, High Voltage and The Last Time I Committed Suicide. Unsurprisingly, she then caught the eye of director and famed appreciator of fine female forms, Paul Verhoeven, who cast her in a small role alongside the likes of Denise Richards in 1997's Starship Troopers. 'It was like being in a video game,' she says now, a tad bitterly. 'There was nothing for my character to do. I just had to run around a lot.'

1999's hugely successful Varsity Blues changed everything, though she'd lost the role she auditioned for to best friend, flat-mate and fellow up-and-comer Ali Larter. Not one to sit back and savour the taste of rejection, Smart dyed her hair brown and won the other key female role as James Van Der Beek's anti-football girlfriend. She also starred that year in Outside Providence, a film written by the Farrelly Brothers though it hardly emulated the success of There's Something About Mary. She figured much more prominently in NBC's TV mini-series The '70s, which saw her playing a California girl lured into a cult, and then segued neatly into a regular small-screen role on Felicity.

She'll be seen next in Scotland, PA, a modern reworking of Macbeth, in which she plays a witch. 'It's so smart. It doesn't have the Shakespearean language but all the plot points.'

Little Miss Smart (she's 5ft 3in) also has the plot points needed, and an unusually altruistic attitude to boot. The object of the Rat Race is a $2 million reward. What would she do in life for $2 million? 'I'd sky-dive naked. But I'd have to donate the money to an environmental cause.'

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