Smash hit

On Cheaper by the Dozen, as the eldest of Steve Martin’s imperial-measure brood, her romantic interludes with Ashton Kutcher had come under the scrutiny of Kutcher’s paramour, a certain Demi Moore. “She would come to the set, just sitting there silently watching the monitor, so it was fairly intimidating,” she says. Sex scenes are never easy, is her point, whatever the persuasion.

While she has tended to specialise in ingénues, Perabo is not quite as young as she looks. She turns 30 this year. “Sexual peak, here I come,” she declares (without divulging any names — “too many people get in trouble that way”). She’s a deceptive package all round: well read (the daughter of a poetry professor), exceedingly bright, eking out a sort of bohemian existence from her base in New York’s East Village — she has raced cars, can fence, scuba-dives, speaks French, knows her jazz and enjoys birdwatching (“What do you call it? Twitching?” she asks).

She tells me she spends her weekends restoring antique books at a local workshop. This seems to be gilding the lily somewhat. “Seriously. I collect old books,” she goes on. “When I first moved to New York, I didn’t have any money, so I always bought used books, and I just got a thing for them. Then I started studying book restoration.” She’s hooked on the smell, the dust, the whole shebang. “And then going over to London the first couple of times, I mean, your used bookstores make ours look like garbage — those shops on Charing Cross Road, tiny knotty little things with those staircases. Ooooh, I love it.”

It was Perabo’s struggling days in New York that chimed so well with Coyote Ugly, the marketeers making great play of the star-is-born parallels between Perabo and her character, Violet, who supported her showbiz dream by sloshing beer in a faux-redneck boozer. “I’d been living in New York and working as an actor not even a year, and to read a script that sort of looked like me, girl moves from Jersey, works in a bar, that stuff was so weird,” she says.

It wasn’t quite such a neat fit. A drama graduate of Ohio University, Perabo had already acted in a couple of films — Whiteboyz and The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle — when the audition for Coyote Ugly came round. She grew up in the Springsteen country of Toms River, just north of Atlantic City, and her parents (of Portuguese and Norwegian stock) had also, rather auspiciously, named their daughter after The Hustler star Piper Laurie.

But after she beat the likes of Britney Spears to the part, you can understand the fuss. Had the film’s makers not decided to rope in country singer LeAnn Rimes to redo Perabo’s vocals, ditching the whole soundtrack album she had recorded (including the annoyingly catchy single Can’t Fight the Moonlight), her career might have gone off in another direction entirely. But she’s not bitter. “You know, I never intended afterwards to then become a singer,” she says. The whole Coyote experience, she acknowledges, was a big leg-up.

Perabo will be brushing with the pop world again in the forthcoming Edison, in which she plays the love interest to one Justin Timberlake. “I was really nervous he was gonna be crap, or have an entourage, but he was really well prepared, and he takes his work really seriously,” she says. Then, after appearing with some-time muso Guy Pearce in the psychological drama First Snow, we can see her rubbing shoulders with wildman rocker Tommy Lee in the mob drama 10th & Wolf. “My mother saw Tommy Lee Goes to College (the TV show),” she says. “She said, ‘Stay away from Tommy Lee.’ And I said, ‘Mom, he’s actually kind of cool.’ And she replied, ‘That’s his angle.’”

There’s no disguising her biggest thrill, though. She has just been cast in The Prestige, from superhot director of the moment Christopher Nolan, all about illusionists in the music halls of late-Victorian London. “He’s a genius storyteller, I can’t even believe I got it,” she gushes. “I play Christian Bale’s wife, the girl you saw in half. And I’ll be playing British again.” Things are moving along an interesting track.

Interview over and back on the street, Perabo issues a peck on the cheek and prepares to snuffle off — amid the steam billowing up from the manholes. It does not escape attention that the establishment Hogs & Heifers sits right around the corner. Famously, this western-themed dive provided the inspiration for the bar of Coyote Ugly. In a few hours’ time, it will be heaving with whooping Jersey boys, waitresses dancing on the counter, brassieres hanging from antlers, not a dry T-shirt in the house. But you won’t catch Perabo in there for love nor money.

“I don’t think they like me,” she whispers. The bar and its staff, she explains, have never forgiven her for participating in a perceived exercise in ripping them off. Given the several years’ worth of roaring trade she assured them, I venture that they should rather run her a free tab for life. Perabo grimaces. “They’re pretty tough girls, you know...”

Imagine Me & You opens on June 16