by Paul Fischer

While some may find turning 30 a less-than-rosy prospect, the god-humoured Selma Blair, co-starring in the romantic comedy A Guy Thing, found the age transition somewhat liberating. "When that happened, I woke up the next morning and said: Oh my God, I can breathe, confesses the beautiful actress in a Los Angeles hotel room. "I do not know what it was but, before 30, I really felt I needed to please people." Now, as Blair is at the crossroads of a high profile career, she says that she wants "to do everything, but I also have to be responsible to myself and need to have a little bit more control and power. I need to get something pretty amazing under my acting belt first before I move forward, though", Blair concedes. Perhaps that is not the 'other girl' role of A Guy Thing, but she still enjoys doing these light-hearted studio films. "The roles I have done for studio movies in the past have been very much supporting and character driven, even if they are rather inconsequential roles, which I don't mind. I take every role very seriously and so I think maybe if you are just playing the foil to the beautiful, glamorous ones, it is bound to be the opposite of the beautiful glamorous one and so you get me," she adds laughingly. "That means you get the one that is more rigid, goofier or something that is going to be the opposite."

Blair, whose screen work has ranged from intensely dark as in Storytelling, through to the ultimate 'other girl' in the teen hit Cruel Intentions, doesn't perceive of herself as typically glamorous, because, she says, "as an actress, I think it would be a waste for me to try and play the glamour part, because truthfully, I am really not at all that." In A Guy Thing, Blair plays Karen, the conservative fiancée of a young man whose pre-marital life is unravelling when he meets Julia Stiles. Having last year played just the opposite as one of three friends in The Sweetest Thing, Selma says that her real self is somewhere in between these two character types. "Hopefully, it has to be a balance. I do believe in the things that Karen has on the outside such as good manners making efforts to put yourself together for people, which some people think of as kind of semi-archaic in this town. So many people think some I am so prim and proper and at the same time so outrageous; I am always the one everyone expects to see on Jackass or something. But I guess I have something in common with these roles that I am playing for studios at least in that I tend to play these tightly wound girls that kind of come undone and that is the comedy in them." Blair loves to show off her comedic side. "I just love making people laugh."

Born and raised in Michigan, Blair says that she wanted to be everything growing up except an actress. "I wanted to be a ballerina, a horse trainer, and then I wanted to be a photographer," Blair recalls. "I just never thought it was feasible for a girl from Michigan to ever make it to the stage or screen and tell a story." For Blair, who early on admired the likes of Sissy Spacek in Coalminer's Daughter "I always thought that this was the dream job for someone to have and eventually I just wanted for to be transported into a role like that." After graduating from college in 1995, Blair recalls that her mother "helped me pack my suitcase and I moved up to New York about a week later," without knowing "if it would be photography that hit or acting. I knew I was going to go and study acting in New York and try to get a book together for photography and assist somebody, so that is what I did."