Slouched in a hotel chair, in a low-cut red dress with matching nail polish and lipstick, actress Kat Dennings looks as though she’s just returned from an arduous Valentine’s date. The outfit may say “come hither” but her posture conveys total exhaustion — understandable, seeing as she’s been doing back-to-back interviews for her new film, Daydream Nation.

Still, the 24-year-old is disarmingly witty and candid, not to mention self-deprecating, which is hard to find in most successful young stars, especially ones who wear tight red dresses.

It’s easy to see why director Michael Goldbach wrote this script with Dennings in mind — it requires an actress who can play smart and sultry while also conveying the abundance of dark humour in the subtext. (Anticipating a rejection, Goldbach initially asked Hayden Panettiere to take the role, but her Heroes schedule kept getting in the way; eventually, he took a deep breath and approached Dennings, who surprised him by saying yes.)

When asked what it feels like to have a part written specifically with her in mind, Dennings tilts her chin up and flips her hair over her shoulder in mock-narcissism.

“Well, of course, there are worse things,” she says. “But I actually don’t think the part was written for me — I think he just meant that I happened to be a good fit … and to tell the truth, if someone offers you a part without an audition, it almost always turns out to be bad. But I loved this script, so I just did my best and crossed my fingers that it wouldn’t suck.”

That Dennings is satisfied with the final result comes as a big relief to Goldbach, a Canadian screenwriter who divides his time between Toronto and Los Angeles and spent six years working on this feature. It’s his directorial debut, one that he’s incredibly nervous about.

He needn’t be, though: Daydream Nation premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this past September, opening the Canada First! program, and has earned mostly strong reviews, one of which endorsed it as “a funnier, sunnier Donnie Darko.” Its central plot involves a teenage girl named Caroline Wexler (Dennings) who moves to a small town where an industrial fire has been burning for as long as everyone can remember and the entire student body at the local high school is either stoned or trying to get stoned. Unable to identify with her peers, Caroline pursues her teacher instead.

Mr. Anderson is played by Josh Lucas (The Lincoln Lawyer), another big casting score for Goldbach, and Dennings says there isn’t another actor with whom she’d rather engage in an awkwardly inappropriate, on-screen love affair. “With Josh, I knew it was going to be fine,” she says. “He’s incredibly talented, and he just completely forgoes vanity in this film; he ends up looking like Jim Jarmusch’s slutty nephew. It’s amazing to watch his character slowly crash and burn.”

But it’s Dennings who carries the film — and this isn’t surprising, considering her experience playing rebellious girls in teenage indie dramas such as Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Charlie Bartlett. When it came to Caroline Wexler, however, Dennings felt she’d have to work a little harder to portray the many conflicting layers in the character.

“She’s really enigmatic,” she says. “Women can sometimes be enigmatic on purpose because — well, we’re just bastards like that. But it often ties into loneliness and feeling like an outsider. To get it right, I did way more preparation than I usually do … I would put together music I thought she might listen to, I read the Claudine books by [Sidonie-Gabrielle] Colette, which were all about a sassy French girl stuck in a rural community.”

It’s this clever, slightly more nuanced version of the classic enigmatic female that drew Dennings toward Daydream Nation, despite how difficult she knew the part would be.

Even though she has since moved on to tackling everything from blockbusters (co-starring with Natalie Portman in Thor) to comedies (voicing Tanqueray the stripper in American Dad!), the actress hopes she’ll encounter more roles like Caroline Wexler in the future.

“She’s pretty emotionally messed up and I knew it would be a hard place to go, but that made me want to play her more,” she says. “If I read a character and say, ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ I try to anyway because I think it helps to be scared a bit.”

Daydream Nation opens April 15.

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Kat Dennings has a thing for fiercely intelligent young women. Over the course of her career, the 24-year-old actress has been drawn to characters who are smarter, more self-assured and wiser than their peers.

“I do seem to like smart girls – I just do,” Dennings said during a recent interview. “They’re inspiring, and I enjoy it.”

At first glance, her character in Canadian Michael Goldbach’s directorial debut, Daydream Nation, may seem like one more brainy girl with beauty to match. Caroline Wexler has moved with her widowed father to a small town where her isolation only amplifies her teenage angst and ennui. Seeing in her high school English teacher the one person she might connect with, Caroline seduces him and finds herself in a love triangle with an awkward young classmate. Dennings’s performance drives the film thanks not only to her character’s world-weary smarts, but the vulnerability lurking beneath her veneer of self-confidence.

Getting inside the head of such a character is what attracted Dennings to the movie, which was shot in Vancouver.

“She’s kind of an enigma. She’s all these different things and she plays these different roles with the people in her life. So the question is, which one is really her?” the Philadelphia native says. “I was just really intrigued by the story and by her, and really just wanted to see what makes her tick.”

Goldbach, who also wrote the film, was similarly inspired by that enigma. After co-writing Childstar with Don McKellar, Goldbach moved back to the small town he grew up in near London, Ont., to figure out his next project.

“I just thought, no one has really done a film about these small towns, about just what crazy places they are and what high school is like in these towns,” he says. But that wasn’t the question that got Goldblach writing the script. Instead, he says, the one he set out to answer was this: “What was going on with that girl in my class who’s, like, really beautiful and always seemed to be involved with older men and always seemed to be trouble?”

Answering that was no easy task for Dennings. As someone who was home-schooled, she couldn’t draw on her own experiences of life in high school. But that didn’t stop her from delving in to the character. To do so, she says she listened to as much of the type of music she imagined Caroline would listen to and also read plenty of Colette, figuring Caroline would be drawn to the French author who mined the conflicts between love and independence in her novels.

While the role adds to the list of strong young women Dennings has already played, it is also a much more complex one, a challenge she sees as helping her to mature as an actor. Here, she finds herself on much more adult turf than in, say, Nick and Norah’s Infinfite Playlist.

“The point of being an actor is to do different things,” Dennings says.

Indeed, Daydream Nation may help her move from kid-friendly fare such as Shorts and the teen flicks she’s starred in to more serious films, a move she began alongside Woody Harrelson as an underage prostitute in Defendor.

An indie darling, Dennings has been in her share of light-hearted movies, whether it’s Big Momma’s House 2 or The House Bunny. But as she gets older, she is increasingly attracted to darker material such as Daydream Nation.

“I really enjoyed the tone of the script. It was very ethereal and very dark and very mysterious, which I love,” she says.

The movie is set largely in a high school, but it’s hardly a teen movie. And though it may be courting controversy by having a high school girl in an affair with a teacher, Dennings says she is ready for it.

“Bring it on,” she says. “That’s just the way she wants to do things. This girl sees an opportunity to escape from her life right in front of her, and I don’t think she thinks it through – she just does it.”

While Dennings says she feels the pull of darker, more mature projects, she couldn’t pass up the chance to play Natalie Portman’s lab assistant in Kenneth Branagh’s upcoming comic book adaptation, Thor.

“I would have done anything to be in Thor. I would have played anybody. I would have been the craft service guy,” she says. “Besides the cast being so incredible, Kenneth Branagh is one of my favourite writer-directors. Getting to work with him was a privilege.”

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Rach scanned her copy of Vogue April 2011 and the high quality scans are now up in the gallery! I typed up the blurbs accompanying the photoshoot.

The five-foot-four-inch actress (“Steal of the Month,” page 294) rebelled against her mother’s health food as a teenager but now credits exercising with Jason Walch (who also works with Jessica Biel and Justin Timberlake) for her better posture. “He makes you want to be healthy. He’s not pushy at all.” The Pennsylvania native and youngest of five still considers herself a newcomer to L.A., and uses curve-hugging dresses as shields. “I’m a little bit shy,” she admits, “so when I have to be out and about for my work, I like to feel strong. Clothes can really help you feel that way.”

Mid-Century Modern
The hourglass architecture of fifties dressing is no less alluring today.
Photographed by Norman Jean Roy.

That fifties silhouette, which once dominated runways from Prada to Marc Jacobs, is supposedly last fall’s news (in favor of a freer seventies swish this spring) but endures for its ladylike charms. “It’s universally flattering–whether you’re thin and tall or short and curvy,” says actress Kat Dennings, who buys vintage versions at home in Los Angeles. The tug in at the waist and push up of the cleavage, combined with a knee-length hem that reveals the slimmest part of the leg, was a look favored by Leslie Caron, Sophia Loren and Rita Hayworth in their day. “Those women were unapologetically hot,” says Dennings of her style inspirations. “And a lot of it was their feminine, iconic dress shapes.”

So how does Dennings modernize the look to avoid retro pitfalls? “A cropped leather jacket would look great over this dress,” she says of WHite House Black Market’s painterly floral frock. “And I’d wear cowboy boots by day and heels at night.” Then there’s her pitch-perfect cat-eye Nicole Miller glasses, a souvenir from her role as Darcy, the cynical, spec-wearing assistant to Thor’s love interest, scientist Jane Foster (played by Natalie Portman), in Kenneth Branagh’s May release, Thor. “Dresses that embrace my hourglass figure work best,” muses the 24-year-old, whose red-carpet appearances, from the premieres of The 40-Year-Old Virgin to Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, are rapidly increasing. “Whatever I wear,” she says, “I need a waist!”

When director Nathan Frankowski came here to shoot the movie “Renee,” I wanted to see if there was more to Orlando than just theme parks. I wanted to see the gritty underside of the city.”

He would need that for “Renee,” a drama built around the life story of Central Florida native Renee Yohe, whose battles with depression, addiction and self-injury (cutting) inspired the charitable foundation To Write Love on Her Arms (TWLOHA). Frankowski wanted to film in places where the real Renee might have gone, where the addicted go for their drugs.

“We found abandoned buildings, Parramore, all these out of the way places. It’s not the Orlando on post cards and billboards. But it’s real. We’re shooting a different texture of the city.”

“Renee” has been filming in and around Orlando for the past month, from downtown to Thornton Park, Eatonville to Full Sail University in Winter Park. It’s a movie with a certain heat behind it, thanks to its ties to TWLOHA, and its stars – Rupert Friend, Chad Michael Murray and Kat Dennings. Dennings, 24, the pretty, pale and pouty-lipped star of “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” took the title role.

“I have a lot of friends and some family who have been through similar things,” Dennings said this week, on location at a 1920s vintage private home in Thornton Park. “When I read the script, I didn’t think I could do it. Too difficult. But that told me that I should do it.”

“Kat strikes me as a young actress who is grounded in challenging herself,” says Winter Park character actor Brian Patrick Clarke, who plays her father in the film. “That’s who you want for a story like this – somebody committed to taking chances.”

Murray, most famous for TV’s “One Tree Hill, says “There’s this enigmatic thing about Renee that pulls you in. She’s captivating. Kat has that. She’s a very free spirit. She doesn’t care what people say. She’s gone to very dark places for this and it’s been a pleasure to watch her do it.”

“Renee” follows Yohe from her days in addiction to the beginnings of her recovery, when friends Jamie Tworkowski (Murray) and David McKenna (Friend) took her in, sobered her up and got her into rehab. Earlier this week, the cast and crew crammed into a house on Shine St. for a “Welcome Home” celebration for Renee, a scene set just as she gets out of rehab. Her parents bring her home and her pals Jessie (Juliana Harkavy) and Dylan (Mark Saul) welcome her at a surprise party. With each take of their reunion, every actor tries something a little different. The tone is flip and off-the-cuff – real.

“You look so HEALTHY!”

“Thanks. What’s new with you guys?”

“I have a manager now.”

“Shut UP!”

“You’ve gotta come hear the band next time we play. There might be a song about you.”

“That’s so amazing! I feel nauseous!”

“Renee” has concert scenes and musical fantasy sequences, since the real Yohe is a big music fan and rock bands were among the first to popularize the ubiquitous TWLOHA t-shirts, raising awareness both for self-injury and for the group trying to do something about it.

“Visually, because it’s a story about somebody abusing drugs and who is into music, the film can branch off into these fantasy worlds,” says Frankowski, a filmmaker best known for the Creationism documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.”

Dennings says that “It doesn’t hurt to do a tough movie with a message,” meaning that this film, about the birth of a cultural phenomenon, has a built in youth audience. “And it’s an important subject.”

About that message, Frankowski, who had a hand in the script, says “We’re not setting out to have all the answers,” and Murray agrees. The path Renee takes to sobriety and self-esteem is not a smooth one.

“It’s ‘Today I’m dealing. Tomorrow, I’m dealing,’” Murray says. “It’s a step by step, day by day thing. That’s what this story says about how you beat addiction. One day at a time.”

“Renee,” which finishes filming next Wednesday, has an edge, a “name” cast and hot subject matter that invite comparisons to another Central Florida underbelly movie – the Oscar winning “Monster” (2003). Much of the local crew from that film is also on board “Renee.” Frankowski wasn’t around for that one. But he knew if he wanted to tell this story, he needed to do it where it really happened.

“The first talk about this movie was that we’d shoot it in Georgia. I said ‘No WAY,’” the director remembers. “Our producers had made ‘Letters to God’ out (in Winter Garden) and they sort of pushed me to shoot out there. But it looks like another corner of Disney World. Too pretty.

“No, I wanted the real Orlando, which becomes a character in the movie. And all these neighborhoods, downtown, the back streets. That’s pretty attractive too, in its own way.”

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Click the image to be taken to the rest of the scans.

Kat Dennings was home-schooled. Did she learn anything? Who knows. What we do know is that she is very nice. She graduated high school when she was 14, and convinced her family to move from Pennsylvania to Los Angeles so she could pursue acting. She’s been acting her ass off pretty much ever since, and now she’s not only acting in movies, she’s writing movies. Thanks for nothing, College!

So, during the eight years most people are in high school and college, Ms. Dennings was steadily chomping away at Hollywood, and this spring the 24-year-old has reached the pinnacle of artistic and financial success for an actor—she’s in a comic-book movie. Thor is about the Marvel character Thor, who is in turn based on the Norse god Thor. The film features beautiful men acting like tough men and beautiful women acting like extremely beautiful women. Thor! Word to Walt Simonson.

What is your favorite thing about yourself?
Jesus, that’s a really hard question. I think I’m a loyal friend. That’s very important.

What does that mean? What do your friends get out of that?
I don’t know, it depends…friendships are so different, from person to person. I appreciate each of my friends as the person they are and try to respect them and love them in the way that they need. Be there for them.

What would you like to change about yourself?
That list keeps growing. [Laughs.] That’s a process. I’m still young and I’m hoping to learn as I grow.

Choose one.
I wish I was a less anxious driver. L.A.’s a stressful place to drive, and I tend to seize up when I drive. I get very nervous when someone goes in front of me. I’m working on that. I’m getting better at it.

I got deep into heavy metal because of driving, it calms me down.
Do you listen to Slayer?

Yes.
I love Slayer. I understand that, it’s very cathartic.

Were you ever a shoplifter?
No. God, no. In fact, I stole something when I was a little kid. I stole it from my friend Anna, from her sewing kit. It was a snowflake bead. I’ll never forget, because I love snowflakes, but I felt so bad. The next time I went over to her house, I snuck it back in.

Did she ever find out?
No. I guess she will now.

Did you take anything from the set of Thor?
No. They gave me stuff, but I never stole anything. [Laughs.] I have a problem; I don’t like to do things that are bad.

You’re better off. Follow the Golden Rule.
I’m a very do-unto-others type of person.

What did they give you from the set?
Oh, they gave me a book from the set and a poster, just little things.

Book and a poster?! What were you, an extra? What book did they give you?
I’m not sharing all the secrets. Maybe when you guys see Thor, you can try to pick it out of the movie.

They gotta give you some cooler stuff.
No, that is so cool. A book is the ultimate present for me.

Oh, then you hit the jackpot.
I did, oh my god. Huge jackpot.

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A story by Jamie Tworkowski about a teen named Renee Yohe who dealt with issues like drugs and depression is now the subject of the movie “Renee,” with Kat Dennings set to play the lead role.

Written in 2006, Tworkowski’s story triggered the “To Write Love on Her Arms” campaign, helping to shed light and bring support to other young people struggling with similar issues. In addition to Dennings, Gym Class Heroes frontman Travie McCoy makes a cameo in the flick, which also stars Chad Michael Murray, Rupert Friend and Corbin Bleu.

When we visited the set of the movie, McCoy told MTV News that his experience on the annual Warped Tour helped him connect to the story at the heart of the film.

“Anybody’s that familiar with Warped Tour, they’ve seen the T-shirts that say ‘To Write Love on Her Arms.’ This movie is about Renee … basically, the girl the charity is about,” he explained. “When Renee puts her headphones on, it’s this sense of escapism and she puts herself into this crazy world that music brings her to.”

Like McCoy, Dennings told us that the music in the film is a key part of telling the inner-monologue of Renee and her pals.

Regarding one particular scene, Dennings explained it revolves around “when [Renee and her friends] get to school and they want to tune out the reality of what school is, ’cause it’s pretty boring and upsetting. To escape it, they all listen to the same song, so we’re gonna see Travie perform and a lot of people dancing, which I’m really excited [about].”

McCoy, who provides the song for the scene, explained his role. “And so my song, ‘A Kid Again,’ is playing in this high school hallway as [Renee's] listening to her headphones and walking down the hallway,” he said. “And I kind of pop out from the locker as a student and roll down the hallway, but I’m really not supposed to be there. It’s just her imagination.”

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Kat pops up around the 3-minute mark.

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