Kristin Kreuk stars in the new film Partition, a drama about the division of India and Pakistan in the 1940s.

Top Sexiest Girls, Hot 100 List, 100 Hottest Girls, 100 Hottest Women, 100 Sexiest Women In The World, Top 99 Most Desirable Women — just find any recent list of hotties, and chances are the name Kristin Kreuk will be on it.

The beautiful Ms. Kreuk, 24, is known far and wide in North America as Lana Lang on TV’s Smallville. She will up the public profile ante this week with the lead role in Partition, a new drama set in the 1940s about the division of India and Pakistan. It opens in theatres Friday.

Kreuk and her co-star, Jimi Mistry, were in Toronto recently to promote the film. Mistry (Touch Of Pink) mostly promoted the idea that he and Kreuk were a romantic pair in real life, not just in Partition, but nobody else wanted to talk about that.

Kreuk, who turns out to be as intelligent as she is beautiful — and as sweet and as charming, so you don’t have to hate her — seems to be at a turning point in her career. She’s toying with a move to New York, she says. She’s not even sure if she wants to be an actor forever.

Kreuk never went after an acting career. It came to her. The Vancouver native intended to go to Simon Fraser University to study environmental or forensic science, but then a casting director contacted her high school during a search for a Chinese-Canadian actor to take a role on TV’s Edgemont. Kreuk (her father is Dutch and her mother is Indonesian Chinese) got the role, despite having no real prior acting experience.

And after Edgemont came Smallville, both of which were filmed in Vancouver.

“I’m 24 now and I’m not sure I want to stay there forever,” she says, “but I don’t know. Vancouver is still home. My family is there, and the people in Smallville are important to me.”

Kreuk says acting was never her specific passion.

“I did decently at school,” she says, modestly, “so the decision was either to continue at school or try acting, and put myself in the position of being really uncomfortable — not that I’m so noble or anything, but it was challenging. I made a lot of mistakes and I made them bigger than if I’d stayed in school, but I’ve learned so much, especially about myself. I have a greater sense of who I am,” she continues.

“Before, I was defiant, I don’t appear it maybe, but I defined myself by what I wasn’t. I think the education I’ve had as an actor I would never have had at university.”

As an example, she says, “I’m not very good at making casual conversation at a party, so taking an interaction and building on it is a skill I’ve started to build in a film environment. I was always too scared. I’d freak myself out and never go out at all.”

Kreuk says she’s thinking carefully about what comes next in her life. She’s aware that’s she’s known for how she looks rather than for how she thinks, and that doesn’t sit quite right with her.

“The way I’m received by people who have seen my work or my photos is really uncomfortable,” she says. And because she’s played vulnerable women as an actress, “There are a lot of people who want to ‘save’ me. And I don’t know if that’s something I want to put out into the world. I don’t know if that’s valuable,” she says.

“I need to find a way to continue to be creative.”