PARK CITY, Utah -- Teri Hatcher checks her wrist for the time. She isn't wearing a watch, just illustrating a point.

"The clock is ticking on when there will not be hype on me anymore," the 42-year-old Desperate Housewives star says, adding with a laugh, "If it hasn't happened already."

This, the tenuous nature of stardom, arises naturally enough since Hatcher is here, attending her inaugural Sundance Film Festival, for the premiere of Resurrecting The Champ.

The boxing-and-journalism-themed drama is the first movie she's made since putting down stakes on Wisteria Lane -- a long overdue move, by Hollywood standards, considering most TV actors exploit their small-screen heat by shooting films during their hiatus.

Just as curiously, Hatcher's role -- as a ferocious TV executive who courts Josh Hartnett's newspaper reporter to join her network -- is only a glorified cameo. So, why so long and why this part?

"I'm very busy with the show 10 months of the year and then I'm my daughter's mother and that's my priority," Hatcher tells the Sun during an interview.

"On the first (Housewives) hiatus, I took my daughter (nine-year-old Emerson Rose) to Africa for 21 days and then (for) the second hiatus I was narrating a documentary of migration of humpback whales from Alaska to Maui ... So my daughter and I went on a tiny boat with these scientists to study these whales ... I just really found it's important for me to use that time to be with her and sort of refuel life."

What appealed to her about Champ, aside from the four pages of dialogue she gets to memorably chew through, was the schedule: One day in Calgary, where the drama was shot last summer.

"I was already in production (of Housewives) in July, but I was able to get one day off. I flew up early one morning, landed, slept for four hours in the hotel and then spent all night in the casino (where her scene occurs). Then I went straight back to the airport."

Though brief, Hatcher describes the experience as rejuvenating.

"It felt like playing ... And it was good to remind myself I could do something other than (her Housewives character) Susan."

Which isn't to suggest she's tired of the ABC suburban soap. In fact, Hatcher declares, "I'll be with it until it dies ... I live very close to where I work, I get to spend a lot of time with my daughter through some very important years and I can pay my bills, which is all you can ask for, so I'm not looking to go elsewhere."

And if the media frenzy surrounding Wisteria Lane has cooled a bit (thanks, Grey's Anatomy), all the better. Reports of backstage feuding, she insists, were inaccurate. "It wasn't a real thing. It was something people liked to talk about."

Yet, if the press is somewhat less interested in Housewives than a year ago, the same can't be said of Hatcher's personal life.

"I'm still, for good and bad of it, and most of it is bad, pretty much followed four out of seven days of the week," says the actress, who is dating director Stephen Kay. "(The paparazzi) follow me going to the grocery store, they follow me picking up my daughter from school, they follow us walking our dog."

Hatcher's tone, however, isn't so much one of indignation as seasoned resignation. After 23 years in the industry, in which she has played everything from Lois Lane to the woman with the "real and spectacular" breasts on Seinfeld, she says age and experience "gives you a perspective that allows you to relax a little bit about it. Because you understand the fleetingness of the highs and that the depths of the lows aren't as deep as they feel. And maybe you can take a step back and look at it more evenly."