The Fresh-Face Factory

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Some of the teen TV shows and films are throwbacks to classic (i.e., old) Hollywood fodder. Lizzie McGuire, a genteel sitcom about a middle schooler, her parents and school friends, provides cheerful role models and helpful homilies. Dissing gets scrubbed into snappy patter, dysfunction into amiable eccentricity. And Duff makes the medicine go down with spoonfuls of beguilement. A budding beauty with good comic timing and the sense not to hit her emotions on the nose, she almost turns Lizzie into a striver. "She doesn't exactly fit in at school," Duff says. "Even though she's cool, and she dresses cool, she doesn't know who she is yet."

Malcolm skews a bit older, with more roughhouse and cynicism, but Muniz's feature films are traditional anxiety fantasies for kids: Big Fat Liar put some brisk wit into its boy-who-cried-wolf plot; Cody Banks is a wan recycling of Spy Kids with a 007 fixation. The Bynes and Duff movie vehicles are more nakedly retro. What a Girl Wants is based on the '50s Sandra Dee bauble The Reluctant Debutante, while The Lizzie McGuire Movie could be Gidget Goes to Rome with an updated pop score. Both put their budding stars in glamorous foreign capitals (London and Rome), where they addle the locals with a sturdy detergent called American charm.

What a Girl Wants, the story of a New York City teen who seeks out her English-aristocrat dad (Colin Firth), takes the easy route of proving Bynes' appeal by making oafs and prigs of the Brits. But in this fable of father finding and mother hugging, Bynes shows her mastery of the pratfall — in one scene, off a fashion-show catwalk and into Prince Charles' lap. She also expertly editorializes with her giant green eyes, which could be out of a Keane or Cocteau painting. She bats, crosses or demurely averts them until the viewer yells uncle, or benignly feels like one.

"I was always kind of goofy," says Bynes. "And I had all this energy. Getting to put on wigs and props and doing characters was perfect for me." On Nick, she did acute impressions of Barbara Walters and Judge Judy and played Ashley, a sweetly sadistic advice columnist. She also refined her pratfall skills, which she now hopes to mothball. On television, she recalls, "I was always ruining something. It was fun for a little bit, but then it got to the point where we were thinking of what I would fall into or off of next."

Teen actors, like baby Tiger Woodses and Michelle Kwans, have been doing what they're good at since early kidhood. Muniz was a trouper at 8, as Tiny Tim in a Christmas Carol in Raleigh, N.C. Bynes was discovered at 10 at a kids' stand-up workshop in Los Angeles. Duff loved playacting in her Houston home: "When I was a kid, I would turn the TV off and act out the scenes myself." At 7, she turned pro.

For these actors, being a kid is a full-time job, with scripts to memorize, tutoring to endure — and all that fan mail. Can they also be ordinary youngsters? Or do they just play them on TV? Duff and Bynes seem to pull it off: nice girls with a grownup sense of proportion. "I pride myself on not being Hollywood," Bynes says. "I could go to the parties and stuff, but for me it's so fake. I know my whole career is based on being perky, but I'm more laid back than people would assume." Duff, when asked about her family, includes the dogs, as if they naturally belong with her parents and elder sister. For her, Hollywood is just a place to work. "The hardest part is being away from home," she says, as if Oz couldn't hold a candle to Kansas.

Of course, all this could be ... acting. For sure, the top kid stars aren't ready to hang it up. Indeed, they are mapping out futures beyond their comfortable TV hits. Duff says, when she first played Lizzie, "I was going through the same period of my life that Lizzie was, so it was kind of cool. But I'm older now," she says, sounding like Travolta when he vaulted from Welcome Back, Kotter to Saturday Night Fever. (The Lizzie TV series has probably shot its last episode, allowing Duff to pursue her film career.) Bynes is even more determined: "I want longevity. I want to be where you don't get sick of me because in one year I'm in so many movies." She seems to realize that for her, What a Girl Wants isn't quite what Roman Holiday was for Audrey Hepburn. "I'm waiting to find something a little bit above this movie. I don't want to go down in maturity."

These kid stars sound mature already. Even before they were 16, they didn't need a license to drive themselves to the top.