Alicia on Life

Not since Glenn Close boiled the bunny has there been a piece of work like this gal. Darian, the femmette fatale of Alan Shapiro's The Crush, is an obsessive 14-year-old who makes a killer beeline for the cute journalist (Cary Elwes) renting her parents' guesthouse. "She's totally a power freak," says 16year-old newcomer Alicia Silverstone, who plays Darian. "When she has a conversation with a guy, she's completely in control," explains the actress, unfazed by the bevy of stylists hovering nearby, prepping her for a photo shoot. "In real life, I wouldn't be like that. Nobody's ever seen me explode—or be sexual, powerful, and manipulative. I'm the opposite. But I guess everybody has her inside."

Oh, that good girl/bad girl dialectic—Silverstone's already got it down cold. A soft-spoken miss with greenish-blue eyes, she moved with her parents from San Francisco to L.A. last year and has several TV gigs under her belt. She was playing "sweet, innocent young girls" before The Crush. "But bad girls," says Silverstone, "are much more interesting." And Darian, she claims, isn't so evil after all. "She just wants to be bad for once, but she gets carried away."

Silverstone can relate to that. Has she ever had one of those major crushes? "Yeah," she sighs. "Of course, I never did anything really awful or drastic."

JAN BRESLAUER