Hype: Erika Christensen

by Stephen Rebello

In real life, young Erika Christensen is not a high school honors student. Nor is she so desperate for her next fix that she'd leave her suburban home to crash with a lowlife drug dealer.

But you'll find that hard to believe when you see how convincingly she plays Michael Douglas' drug-addicted daughter in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic.

Indeed, Christensen was so persuasive in just one reading for the coveted role that Soderbergh quickly met with her and offered her the part the following day. "I'm a Goody Two-shoes who's never taken anything stronger than Tylenol, and Steven directed me like a good parent who trusted I would do the right thing," she says. "So I played her like a bored girl blessed with everything except parents actually involved in her life."

In reality, however, Christensen's folks, with whom she lives, are very much a part of their daughter's world. "They were worried about me being in such a powerful movie, but after talking at length with Steven, they knew why I wanted to make it so badly."

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In the end, nothing about the hard-hitting film ended up rattling her parents. "Except," she laughs, "when Topher Grace, who plays my boyfriend, told them at the screening, 'Just so you know, in the kissing scene, that was a lot more tongue than I was used to.' They now realize, since we're friends, that it's just Topher's sense of humor."

Though Christensen cut her teeth guesting on TV shows like "The Practice" and "Touched by an Angel," the actress had never before worked with box-office draws like her Traffic costars Dennis Quaid, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Douglas.

And though she's just wrapped an indie, Home Room, in which she stars as a survivor of a high school shooting, she acknowledges that Traffic will be a hard act to follow. "I've worked with people who know exactly what they're doing," she says. "I've become completely spoiled."

Look for Erika Christensen in the Hype section of the February issue of Movieline magazine, the More Sex than Usual issue.

Should Erika Christensen receive an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress? Sound off in the Movie Forum.
Photographed by Cynthia Levine

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