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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- "Hello. How are y'all. Does anybody want any water?"
Leggy blonde California girl, former supermodel and onetime screen sex symbol Cameron Diaz looks like an unmade bed.
The makeup is absent, the hair's a mess and the wardrobe is aggressively declasse.
And, then, there's that movie-actor false familiarity and humility: Can I pour y'all a glass of water ... off the soundstage, I'm just plain folks ... a serious actress.
Give the kid credit; she learns fast. After only two years in the business, at the tender age of 23, and with only four movies to her credit (only two released), she really knows how to talk the talk.
And she's here today to talk about She's The One, the second film from Edward Burns, who was responsible for last year's big little-film success story, The Brothers McMullen.
In She's The One, opening Friday, Diaz plays Heather, a ruthless career woman who uses men for pleasure and advancement. She's part of a strange triangle with two Irish brothers, one of whom (Burns) broke his engagement to Heather when he found her in bed with another man. The other (Mike McGlone) is an equally ruthless stock broker Heather's using as a boy toy.
Burns says the character we see on screen is twice the one he had on paper -- largely thanks to Diaz.
"Cameron said, `Let's make this character more interesting,'' he recalls. "She complained that Heather was a bit too two-dimensional."
This wasn't an actor flexing her ego and demanding more screen time, Burns adds. It was a case of an actor having the nerve to improve on a director's creation.
"I loved her right off," Diaz says of Heather. "I even loved her deviousness. But, when I read (the script), I thought she was a little too cold.
"I thought, `If Mickey (Burns's character) could love this person, there must be something about her worth caring about."
There's no question that the Heather that landed on screen is the most interesting female character in the film. Heather's a survivor, a woman who had to sleep her way to the top and is remorseless about it. Yet Diaz gives her a complexity and subtlety that carries her far above the iron-lady or whore-with-a-heart-of-gold stereotypes.
"She's an extreme of what women think they should be, about women taking power," Diaz says.
Heather is also a far cry from where Diaz started in movies, as Jim Carey's love interest in The Mask, which saw her in skimpy cocktail dresses and a pumped up bosom, playing the sweet and sexy bad girl gone good.
The Cameron Diaz who sits here today talking so thoughtfully about her character and her craft is also a far cry from the model-turned-starlet we met two years ago when The Mask was released.
Back then, Diaz said things like: "(Director) Chuck Russell was looking for a really unique way to introduce me to the world." She looked drop-dead gorgeous, could barely utter a sentence without a giggle, and writers who met her were placing bets on whether she'd ever make another film.
Now, with the deranged hair and black circles under the eyes and ragedy-ass clothes, Diaz is making a statement.
Despite it all, she's still an arrestingly attractive woman. The point is that it no longer matters.