NEW YORK -- She's sometimes called nervy Neve Campbell, but she isn't really.

The 23-year-old Toronto native knows what she likes and what she doesn't like, and mostly she doesn't like foolish questions.

Picture it.

Campbell's sitting with a roomful of reporters in a hotel room and they're asking about her role in Scream 2, which is the same as Scream.

She's patiently putting up with the forced glibness, until a reporter wonders out loud to her: When did you last feel like screaming?

"Oh," says Campbell, "right now."

She's kidding -- sort of.

Campbell is doing her duty here promoting the Wes Craven-directed, Kevin Williamson-written sequel to Scream, which opens tomorrow.

She plays the no-nonsense target of a slasher killer's rage but this time her Sidney is in college, not high school, in the movie that again combines humor with horror.

The difference during her promotional interviews this year compared to last is that Campbell has had just about enough of the Scream thing -- tired of the trend and wary of being typecast.

"I'm not sure I'm going to be in Scream 3," she says. "I'm concerned about being a scream queen. I don't want to be seen as just that."

Actually, Campbell understood role association before the Scream series, thanks to her convincing Julia Salinger character on TV's Party Of Five.

She's so convincing on the show -- which debuted in '96 -- that Neve and Julia seem almost interchangeable.

Ironically, while her Julia character recently married, Campbell recently filed to divorce her husband, Jeff Colt.

But back to Party Of Five.

"It's pretty much a golden cage for me," reports Campbell candidly. "I've been offered films that I can't do because of Party Of Five, but then again I can think of worse problems."

Like not working at all. Although that actor's reality hasn't haunted her much since moving to L.A. from Toronto a few years ago.

And she has managed to do some movie roles besides Scream one and two.

Campbell even got to return home for a week in the autumn to do a cameo in Studio 54, the Mike Meyers ode to the '70s which was shooting in Toronto.

"It wasn't too much work," says the Canadian national ballet school drop-out who as a teenager worked in the Toronto production of Phantom Of The Opera.

"I play a soap opera celebrity of the '70s, but I didn't get to dance. That was disappointing.

"I had to fly back to L.A. twice to do Party Of Five. That's four red-eye flights in a week."

Still, while in her hometown, "I got to see the fall which was nice. And I took my brother to a pumpkin farm, and I got to feel like a human being for a while."

In another movie, she portrays something less than human. It's called Wild Things with Matt Dillon, Bill Murray and Kevin Bacon.

"I'm an ex-convict, bisexual drug addict," she says enthusiastically of the picture due out next year.

Let's see ex-con, drug addict, bi-sexual? Contrary to the image, wouldn't you say?

"That's the point," the nervy Neve Campbell says, "I don't want an image."


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