New starlet is Piper active

They're calling her the new Julia Roberts, and Piper Perabo thinks she knows why. 'It's just that I have a really big mouth!'

But it's much more than that, and much more than the fact that, inevitably, she's a babe. Perabo shares more with Roberts than the need to use twice as much lipstick as anyone else. She has that impossible-to-fake on-screen vulnerability which makes viewers laugh hard and cry harder. And again like Roberts, this 23-year-old is as winning and charismatic off-screen as on.

Piper Perabo won the lead in Coyote Ugly after an exhaustive search by ?berproducer Jerry Bruckheimer and his team. She is the lead, though you wouldn't know it from the posters dotted all over town featuring five scantily-clad chicks, none familiar except Tyra Banks. 'Look at those girls,' says Perabo unselfishly, 'it would be stupid not to have them all on the poster.' She admits she was a little worried, though, 'upset' she says, when she first saw the film's trailer. Like the posters, it concentrates on the Coyote Ugly of the title, a New York bar where the bartenders look like models and dance on the bar when things get really hot inside.

But trailer and poster are deceiving - the film is more Flashdance than Showgirls. 'The story of me and Adam Garcia [her very attractive Aussie love interest] and me and my dad, played by John Goodman, wasn't there at all. You wouldn't even know there's a love story. So I think audiences will be surprised and happy with what they come away with. If I was a teenage girl, I'd be very interested in seeing the Adam Garcia story.'

The untold story is the age-old tale of small-town girl moving to big city and finding herself the hard way. Perabo's Violet leaves New Jersey for New York City to follow her dream of making it as a singer. Along the way, she is taken for rides she hadn't bargained on, and sees her dream coming true, if not quite the way she planned. Perabo left New Jersey in search of a dream, too - to make it as an actress - but says the similarities end right there. 'Violet is so shy and she's a songwriter, whereas I'm more of a performer. My grandmother had this porch which had curtains in front of a sliding door. It was a perfect stage, so for years I put on plays there.'

While Violet is no dummy, she's no Piper Perabo either. Perabo was 'pretty studious and bookish at school' and 'not one of the popular girls at all'. She studied acting at college and, like most attractive female transplants to NYC, worked as a bartender. 'I was a cocktail waitress at this place called Lemon where you had to wear a nice dress and carry a tray. I was pretty clumsy. There were plenty of spillages and broken glasses. People in New York are very into ordering that hot new drink - the fuzzy pink girlie on the beach with a twist, stuff like that - which I knew nothing about. Fortunately, I got my first acting job soon after I started.' Her parents - unlike Violet's over-protective father in the film - supported her move. 'My dad's a poetry professor and my mum's a physical therapist. But they're kind of old-school hippies so they're really big believers in "if this is what makes you happy, if this is what gets your heart going, it's probably what you should be doing".'

Her break, in best showbiz story tradition, came accidentally. She accompanied a friend to an audition, and the casting director assumed she was auditioning too. When Perabo protested that she wasn't, the casting director ignored her. 'She said, "I'll put you in ten minutes. Here are the sides [lines]."' She didn't get the part but the casting director, evidently sensing substantial promise, 'made a few calls' and Perabo soon landed a manager. Also in best showbiz tradition, she had to lie a little to snag the role of Violet who, being an aspiring singer/songwriter, needed to look vaguely convincing with a guitar. 'I wanted this really badly so I went to a pawnshop and bought a guitar. I was working really hard at it but I wasn't good enough in time for the first audition. Each time I went back I just kept saying, "Oh, I forgot my guitar, I'll bring it next time."'

She didn't know if or when she was down to the final handful. 'You know never to believe them because they say things like, "Yes, we're screen-testing you but Meryl Streep is interested."' She got the call from her manager who couldn't make himself heard above the raucous noise of his setting, a New York Knicks basketball game. 'I was like, "Just call me after the game," then finally I heard him screaming "You got it, you got the movie."' Effective strumming was just the beginning. A super-flat stomach was also in order so Perabo and the other girls were put in the charge of Jerry Bruckheimer's personal trainer. 'We were on that very fashionable high-protein diet. Pretty hard for a vegetarian like me. There was a lot of lettuce and wholewheat bread.'

The cheater in her couldn't last. 'I love ice-cream,' she laughs. Like Roberts's, Perabo's laugh is very loud, very distinctive. One day, Adam Garcia summoned her to his trailer saying he wanted to work on some lines with her. She knew something was up: 'He's just not that sort of guy. He'd never say, "We need to work on the social ramifications of this scene."' In his trailer she saw 'two huge sundaes. He said, "Let's just eat really fast and they'll think we're working." So we just sort of inhaled them. But yes, I had to do a lot of crunches for this film.'

A lot of kissing too. 'I did one kissing scene with Adam 31 times. I felt really inadequate, like my kissing was no good.' But it wasn't too bad because she and Garcia got on famously, though not too famously. 'We are great friends.' She's not lying now, though has been coached by her publicist on 'personal question strategy'. Does she have a boyfriend? 'I don't talk about that in the press.' She does, though. I see her saying goodbye to him later in the day, and he's not movie star good-looking like Adam Garcia, which says something about what Perabo considers important in life.