Neve Campbell sizzles in a new movie and gets ready for a jump to full-time movie stardom

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

tart this story where it ends: on a drizzly night in Los Angeles, Neve Campbell's car is running out of gas. You've been at a coffee bar with the rising young actress, and afterward she takes you for a spin in her dark green Porsche and then offers to drive you to your hotel. The needle on the gas meter is on the running-on-fumes side of empty, and there's even an exclamation mark shining crimson on the dashboard. But Campbell, preternaturally polite, continues blithe small talk. "Is that band the Cult still together?" she asks. You confess that when it comes to '80s goth-metal bands, you're no trivia master. She continues, "I went for coffee with this guy who was in the Cult, and I was wondering if they were still doing anything." The needle dips further. You're close enough to the hotel. You get out so that she can get gas. She drives off, smiling.

There's a resolute sunniness about Campbell; she's friendly under fire, charming despite adversity. On her popular Fox TV series Party of Five, Campbell's character Julia is beset by such problems as a brother who may be dying and an adulterous husband, but she's always glowingly empathetic, never simply tragic. In the teen-horror flicks Scream and Scream 2, despite being pursued by psychos and serial killers, she exudes likability. And in her newest film, the sweaty, hormonal romp Wild Things, Campbell, 24, glistens with sincerity, even as her character is caught up in an unlikely swirl of perjury, murder and three-way sex.

Most impressively, Campbell's good-hearted appeal is never giddy or silly or teeny bopperish--her onscreen presence, regardless of her surroundings, invariably has a sense of grace, even a whiff of gravitas. Her talent for evoking approachability, not to mention the warmth of her caffe mocha brown eyes, invites infatuation. She "makes you care and empathize with her," says Bob Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax, the studio behind the Scream films. Says Peter Roth, president of the Fox Entertainment Group: "She's beautiful but accessible. You feel she could be your friend."

Everybody wants to be Neve's friend these days. She's one of the recent crush of young actors--an impressive number of them Canadian--whom Hollywood powerbrokers are starting to bank on as the lure to bring a new generation of fans into movie theaters and in front of televisions. Her rise has been rocket fueled. She was born and raised in Guelph, Ont. Her father, a high school drama teacher, and her mother, who ran a dinner theater, divorced when Neve was young. At age 9 she joined the National Ballet School of Canada; at 14 she dropped out of school to join the Toronto production of The Phantom of the Opera; at age 20 she moved to Los Angeles and was cast in Party of Five. "This new wave of talent is all-consuming in Hollywood right now," says Cathy Konrad, who produced the Scream movies. "Neve has a step up because audiences have been identifying with her for years on Party of Five. When she makes her real star turn, she'll have a body of work behind her."

With Wild Things, Campbell is making a bid to expand and eroticize her wholesome TV image. Here's Neve in revealing cutoffs and tank tops, wearing too much eyeliner and sporting tattoos. In Wild Things, she's a walking Jerry Springer episode, bitter, bisexual, addicted to drugs and booze, a high school truant who lives in a trailer home and curses in courtrooms. Interestingly, this outrageous character has something in common with the real Campbell in at least one respect. "I had a talk with Neve before we started the film," says Wild Things director John McNaughton. "She comes from a working-class background. At the National Ballet School, she was surrounded by kids from wealth, and she felt like a kid from the wrong side of the tracks and an outsider. She used those memories to make a connection to her character in the movie."

Although Wild Things features plenty of sex--you see a few millimeters more than you ever wanted to of Kevin Bacon--Campbell drew the line at exposing anything more than her shoulder blades. Says she: "If I have to show my breasts, then I shouldn't be doing the movie at all." According to her family (she has three siblings, all brothers), she's not only modest but also a little shy. Says her older brother Christian: "I was with her at the Wild Things premiere, and I could see her sink into her seat during the make-out scenes."

Party of Five--as you might reasonably expect of a series that centers on a family of orphans--is often a very emotional show, a kind of smarter, less sudsy soap opera at times, and the twists and turns of its story lines regularly wring tears from television viewers. Will Julia dump her husband? Will Bailey stay sober? Will anybody notice that little Claudia is skipping school?

The continuing drama and trauma of the series has begun to wear on Campbell, even when the cameras are off. Hence another reason beyond career enhancement for her move to the big screen: escape. Later this year she will appear in the satirical disco-days flick 54 with fellow Canadian Mike Myers. And with her brother Christian, she's co-producing and co-starring in Hair Shirt, a low-budget comedy. Just this month she announced a deal to co-star with Matthew Perry (of the TV show Friends) in a big-screen romantic comedy titled Three to Tango, slated to begin filming in April. "My audience and my critics have said they'd like to see me do something lighter, and I actually wouldn't mind doing something lighter," says Campbell. "All my characters so far have had dead parents. So maybe it's time for a comedy."

Party of Five is the kind of franchise most actors live for. It has a young, demographically desirable following; it's award winning and critically acclaimed; and the show's characters are more deeply imagined and richly realized than in many Hollywood features, including pretty much every movie ever done by a cast member of Friends. Party has also spawned a host of imitative television series, including Dawson's Creek and Significant Others, that have a similarly youthful, earnest outlook.

So it seems ill advised, in a David Caruso exiting NYPD Blue sort of way, to long to leave a show like Party of Five. Still, Campbell, who is in the fourth year of a six-year contract to star in the show, says she will be through with TV after her deal is up. "Like any job, you do it long enough, and it becomes tedious," she says. "And although I love my show, it is somewhat tedious playing my character. There are only so many plot lines in the world, and we've done them all." Also, in order to work simultaneously on TV and in film, she has had to put in more than a few seven-day weeks. She does find time to do some volunteer work for the Tourette Syndrome Association--her younger brother, Damian, has Tourette's--but she does not often have time for socializing and just plain fun. "I need to have a life," she says. "I don't have one right now."

Indeed, the long hours seem to have taken quite a toll on her personal life. She says she's in the process of getting a divorce from her husband of two years, Jeff Colt, who is also an actor, though so far a less successful one. Campbell's favorite book is the inspirational philosophical text The Prophet. "There's one passage about relationships," she says, "about two trees growing, and if they grow too close together, they'll shade one another and won't be allowed to grow, but if they grow enough of a distance apart, they'll be able to grow and continue their love. I find that to be really beautiful.

"Happiness is a choice," Campbell says. "I could sit here and say I'm really tired, and I work far too much, and I wish I had more time for my loved ones. Or I could sit here and say working is a great problem to have, and I have wonderful opportunities, and at some point I'll be able to take as much time off as I want. I choose to be happy."

So let's end this story where it started: Neve arriving and, upon seeing you, smiling so broadly that it feels for a moment as if you go way back. She is dressed crazysexycool: a puffy hat, a low-cut leotard top with a cardigan throwover, knickers, black boots. There is a freshly cut-apple sweetness about her face and also something simultaneously sad and bright, like sunlight off a raindrop. This amiable radiance is, of course, why she's a star, and you're getting it firsthand now, unfiltered, undiluted.

Still, she's got a tricky road ahead. Finding film scripts as well written as her television series, scripts that aren't steaming chunks of Gen Y exploitation, would be a tough task for any young actress trying to make the TV-screen-to-silver-screen leap. Campbell knows she's got a long way to go and a lot to learn. "Five years ago, I thought I was all grown up," she says. "I was doing Phantom; I was working at a very young age, and I thought I knew everything. I look back now and realize I knew absolutely nothing. Today I know that when I look back five years from now, I'll do the same thing. I'll look back and see that I knew nothing. And I guess that means I'm learning something." But that's the future. Right now, with a scrappy new movie, a hot TV series and that smile, she's got enough star power in the tank to go wherever she wants.

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SHIRT TALES

Hair Shirt, Neve Campbell's forthcoming film, has a secret: it may appear to be a movie about Americans, but it's really got a Canadian soul. The movie--now in postproduction--is a low-budget romantic comedy about a young writer/actor who moves to Los Angeles and struggles to assimilate. Although the hero is American, Campbell says everyone in the film is "based around friends of ours in Toronto."

Despite the fact that Campbell lives in the Los Angeles area, she says she is "definitely a Canadian at heart" and is still a Canadian citizen. She's highly conscious of the cultural differences between Canadians and Americans. "We're constantly apologizing," she says. "We're almost overly polite, which is a good thing and a bad thing. We tend to sit back, instead of being as aggressive as Americans."

Campbell says, smiling, that making Hair Shirt was very "incestuous" since the cast and crew were made up of friends and family. She and her brother Christian, an actor and theater producer, co-produced the film and appear in it. Working on the project helped bring Neve and Christian closer together. "Years ago, it was hard," says Christian, "because I was really struggling, having a hard time even feeding myself, and then to watch her get all this fame and money--I was, like, what is going on? What's going on in my life? Now I'm finding my own place."

His sister plans to do the same thing by producing more films in the future. "If there aren't a lot of female projects out there," she says, "then I'll create them." The brother-sister duo hopes to screen Hair Shirt at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. "And then," she adds, "the rest of the film festivals next year, God willing."