Lawrence.com

New York — Natasha Lyonne's normally unruly corkscrew hair is now straight as glass. She's developing a fondness for designer tops and stiletto heels. Her latest film role is a bubbly cheerleader.

Ah, but don't be fooled.

The 21-year-old actress who derisively calls most of her peers' projects "a bunch of teen movies" hasn't yet traded in her sneer for a pair of Hollywood pompoms.

"I've always been sort of outside, looking in," Lyonne says. "What's so weird about suddenly having a strange level of success is that, all of a sudden, I'm supposed to be an insider."

So it comes as no shock that while Lyonne begins "But I'm a Cheerleader" as a happy-go-lucky teen queen, she ends it as a lesbian in military fatigues wreaking revenge on a homosexual rehabilitation facility.

"This movie has truth, this movie has heart. It's made from a place of goodness. That's important to me," she says. "I'm constantly wondering where the good projects are."

Questioning the status quo

The film fits nicely in her resume of offbeat, satirical parts: "Slums of Beverly Hills" and "American Pie." Even as a child, when she did kiddy TV, it was in "Pee-wee's Playhouse."

"I don't know what a mainstream choice really is," she says, laughing. "Considering what the mainstream is, it's very easy to make what seem like offbeat choices -- unintentionally."

Lyonne, who has spent the day publicizing the new movie, says she turned down lucrative and high-profile roles on "Dawson's Creek" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" to keep on exploring the messy, unhappy lives of young women.

"People have been asking me all day, 'Why do you always pick weird characters that aren't the norm? Your characters aren't normal.' I'm like, 'What?' They say, 'Well, they go through things. And they kind of have these weird obstacles it always seems like,"' she says, rolling her eyes.

"I'm like, 'What do you do, man? Did you just wake up in the morning and things were just perfect and you've been living in your bubble? Do you just want to go to the theater and just giggle a lot?"'

With vitriol like that, it's no wonder Lyonne has a gaggle of publicists looking extremely worried. One tries unsuccessfully to hover in the room during an interview -- just in case.

"Natasha really seems to know who she is and she's unapologetic about everything," says Brian Wayne Peterson, the screenwriter of Lyonne's latest movie. "She does not shy away from any subject matter. ... You name it, she tackles it."

Sparking up another Marlboro, Lyonne gets ready to tackle again. A waifish-looking woman with wide eyes, she takes a dim view of today's filmmaking.

"It's all really pandering. Like, 'You've Got Mail'? OK, I'm just picking on things now because it's late and I'm tired and sick of making the point politely, but 'You've Got Mail' is not a normal movie. That is, like, just a dumb movie -- there's a difference," she says.

Then she pauses, to rethink her position.

"OK, that's a bad example," she admits, "because I haven't seen 'You've Got Mail.' But you can just sometimes tell what things are -- they're not real. I don't know what the joke is, because I don't get it. I'm not in on it. And so I won't do those things."

Out of gas, Lyonne slumps in her seat. "I need more coffee," she laments.

Looking for something normal

Lyonne traces her jaded view to an itinerant childhood that began in Long Island, N.Y., then Israel for two years and finally Manhattan after her parents divorced when she was 10.

Natasha's grandparents, both Holocaust survivors, offered to pick up her high school tuition as long as she attended a private yeshiva. It was a place, she says, "I had no place being."

"I didn't fit in at school. I wasn't rich enough," she recalls. "The kids were like, 'My parents aren't divorced, your parents are. You're weird. You're just bizarre."'

Soon, she was skipping classes, preferring to wander the city with a Walkman pumping Jimi Hendrix and The Doors. After Woody Allen cast her in "Everyone Says I Love You," the school lost patience and expelled her.

So playing a fish-out-of-water adolescent with prosthetic breasts in "Slums of Beverly Hills" or the only deflowered teen among a school of virgins in "American Pie" didn't feel like such a stretch.

"I guess subconsciously maybe, or somehow karmically, I like those kind of roles because that's exactly what I was growing up -- you know, looking at that world and not understanding it," Lyonne says.

"I'm still not comfortable in my skin, by any means. I just turned 21, I'm still figuring this whole thing. I'm sick, in my personal life, of being expected to be funny and wild. There are certain expectations because of my movies. I'm just boring to me."

Lyonne next wants to do something unexpected: She dreams of putting aside the angst and darkness to play something straight ... like, maybe, a straight cheerleader.

"What I'm really wanting to do right now is just a normal role that was written for anybody. I'm kind of just curious, on an artistic level, to see would that character also end up being bizarre? Is it me and I'm oblivious to it? Am I that strange and I don't know it?"