Ah, we love to engage in civic discourse! In Heartbreakers, you had to stay “attached” to Ray Liotta’s crotch for hours to shoot one scene. Was your relationship with him forever altered? That was my first day of work, so it was like, welcome to the film. He was actually really great about it. He was making jokes as the day went on, saying, “Do I need more Old Spice down there?” Unfortunately, my grandmother came to visit that day. She was looking for me in the shot and couldn’t find me. My mom said, “She’s underneath the desk.” Not good to have to explain the blow job scene to your grandma.
Have you had any similarly awkward real-life dating experiences? Oh, absolutely. Like when a guy is starting to heat things up with you and then starts talking about his mother, or you’re making out and the phone’s ringing and he’s like, “Oh, my mom’s calling,” and then he goes to get the phone.
Have men ever disgusted you so much that you’ve thought of switching teams? I think every girl thinks about it once in a while when men are frustrating. And my girlfriends and I always have a joke that if it doesn’t happen for us by the time we’re 30, we’ll just throw ourselves a big wedding and marry each other.
We look forward to that invite in 2009. Which do you prefer: television or movies? I’m a huge fan of TV. A TV schedule allows you to be yourself a little bit more because you work from nine to six and you can be at home with your friends. But if I could do the movies that Julia Roberts and Nicole Kidman get to do, I would do movies all the time.
You sing as well as act, and in Japan, you’re revered as a pop star. Encountered any particularly fanatical fans? Probably the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me there was this guy chased us down in the middle of moving traffic for about four blocks before we noticed that he was behind us. I looked back and saw him running and holding up my photo. We pulled over, and I signed it. He was absolutely having a heart attack. I’m not sure if that was because of me or because he had run behind a car in oncoming traffic.
You have an album called Let’s Go Bang. Please explain. It was supposed to be this dance called the Bang, and the song never hit so we never came up with the dance. Everybody just thought I was a really dirty 16-year-old.
Ashton Kutcher set you up on a fake audition and then had the producer get shaken down for money in front of you. He made you cry. What was it like to get punk’d? It was horrible. I was convinced I was going to die, but I love that people I would never normally meet come up to me all the time and feel sorry for me because they watched it and know how absolutely tortured I was.
You’ve said you’ve forgiven Ashton. Is this all part of your master plan for revenge? Oh, I will get him back.
You appeared on the cover of Maxim way back in 1999. Still hear about it? It’s funny, I went to visit a bunch of the troops at the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington when they got back from Iraq, and over half of them had my first Maxim cover issue with them at their bedside. They said they were allowed to bring a certain number of things to Iraq, and so many of them felt the need to let me know that they had spent quite a few evenings with me. Under normal circumstances, I would have been like, “OK, that’s gross,” but I was, oddly, very touched.
