Kat DENNINGS doesn't play your ordinary teenager. She wouldn't know how.
As a high school senior who winds up on a romantic night out in Manhattan in "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist," she's entirely believable but never predictable. The low-fi romantic teen comedy, which opens Friday, relies on the chemistry between its two leads for the audience to care about their late-night adventures and emotional exploration. Michael Cera, who plays Nick, has been reliably serving innocence on wry since his years on the Fox TV show "Arrested Development" and more recently in "Juno" and "Superbad." Dennings' Norah, in all her goofy charm and vulnerability, is his perfect match.
"The most exciting thing to me about Kat is that she seems to be totally unaffected by other people's expectations of the way a young actress should perform in this kind of a film," says "Nick & Norah's" director, Peter Sollett ("Raising Victor Vargas"). "Her being liberated from that liberated the film in many ways, and certainly her character from cliche."
That refreshing disregard for the de rigueur is just as noticeable in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," in which Dennings played Catherine Keener's put-upon teenage daughter, and in "Charlie Bartlett," as the love interest to the titular character, a high schooler and would-be therapist played by Anton Yelchin.
"She's like everything that Molly Ringwald and Winona Ryder and Julia Roberts were, wrapped up into one amazingly talented girl," says "Nick & Norah's" screenwriter, Lorene Scafaria. "She's just so natural."
Sitting in a Burbank cafe on a recent sweltering day, Dennings hears the relayed compliment and her huge gray-blue eyes widen further. "I want to date myself!" jokes the ingenue. The 22-year-old actress provides a simple explanation why her characters never feel like your typical high schoolers: She never went to high school.
"I don't know the way normal teenagers act," she says.
Home-schooled
Dennings, who was born and raised outside Philadelphia, surrounded by woods and creeks and horse farms, says she was a sensitive kid who just couldn't bear the school environment. "I kind of wanted to stay home and write and be around my trees and stuff," she says. Preschool was a short-lived experience. "I'd cry all day and want my mom and want to go home. I know that a lot of kids have separation anxiety, but it was something else." Her mother decided to home-school her.
