With long, curly red hair, porcelain skin and a loud, infectious laugh, actress Rachelle Lefevre is hard to overlook. But until she appeared as the bitchy bloodsucker Victoria in the 2008 smash hit Twilight, she’d been a relative unknown. Now with the hotly anticipated second film in the series, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, hitting theaters November 20 and two more films in the works, Lefevre is about to find herself in the glare of the spotlight.

“When I first got to LA, everybody said I was too ‘girl-next-door’ for edgier roles,” she says. “I ended up playing a stripper, an escort, a vampire and an off-her-rocker troubled poet. I keep playing roles that are not even close to the girl next door.”

Despite the fact that he is an exquisite beauty—with perfectly formed red, red lips and a face that might have been dreamed by the Romantic poets—he thinks he resembles “a cartoon character.” One of his legs is longer than the other, which makes him look, he assures you, “like an idiot.”