Jaime Pressly 20Q Interview

The sexy star of My Name Is Earl talks about her tomboy past, relives her days in hormone hell, explains why only pussies cheat (and why cheaters always get caught) and tells why she feels safest in a strip club

Q1

PLAYBOY: What kind of kid were you, growing up in rural North Carolina?
PRESSLY: I was a very ambitious and athletic kid. My mom was a dance teacher, so I grew up taking dance classes, which I loved. I took voice lessons, was a majorette and twirled a damn baton. Lots of the girls in North Carolina were tough. You have your prissy, etiquette-minded Southern belles, but then you have the hot tomboys. My dad called me "the prissy tomboy." I grew up near the water. I'd wear a dress but then run outside and be like one of the guys, jumping onto a boat, fishing, getting dirty and playing war.

Q2

PLAYBOY: When did you become more interested in making love, not war?
PRESSLY: I was always flirting with the guys, but I guess I really noticed them freshman year in high school when everybody's hormones are raging and you suddenly look like a totally different person. I saw the guys in my grade as friends, but there was a whole slew of cute older guys in football and baseball uniforms. It wasn't so much their looking at me as my looking at them. I was out of my cootie phase.

Q3

PLAYBOY: Once you beat the cooties problem, did you date a lot?
PRESSLY: I've always been into long relationships, but I didn't have a normal high school experience. I moved to California in 1992 and spent the first semester of my sophomore year in Costa Mesa. When we left North Carolina, it was kind of a joke around town; people said, "Oh, she'll be back in a couple of years." But I left school and went to Japan on a modeling contract when I was 15.

Q4

PLAYBOY: Also when you were 15 you gained legal emancipation from your parents. That's serious business, isn't it?
PRESSLY: People try to shed a derogatory light on that situation, as if it was a Macaulay Culkin kind of thing when I divorced my parents. But my parents were in the middle of a divorce and going through sort of a midlife crisis after being married for 21 years. I was in hormone hell, so going to Japan on a modeling contract seemed like a great escape. Neither of my parents could come with me, and in order to get out of school for that semester and go on my own without a legal guardian, the child labor laws said I needed to be an emancipated minor. My parents signed away legal guardianship, and I went with my mother to the court and spoke to the judge, who understood that it was more about my going to work than anything else. It wasn't about my parents; it was about my wanting to get the hell out of Dodge.

Q5

PLAYBOY: When you left modeling to tackle TV and movies in the late 1990s, how well did you adjust to Hollywood?
PRESSLY: I'm not somebody who has to compete with other people, but I'm very competitive with myself. It's always "How far can I go? How great can I do it?" I never got catty with any of the other girls up for the same jobs. Instead, I befriended them. I would go into a room on an audition with 10 other girls there and always be the first one to say hi. To me, it's always "May the best man win."

Q6

PLAYBOY: One of your first movies was Poison Ivy: The New Seduction, in which you're often nude.
PRESSLY: That was my first big role, and all of a sudden they were going, "Jaime, we're going to add some things, like this scene is going to be topless and then this scene...." I was so new, I didn't know my rights at all. I locked myself in my dressing room and called my lawyer: "Look, they're adding scenes. They want to do lower frontal nudity. I don't want to do that." It was a scary situation, but at the same time I will say I don't ever look back and regret anything. I look at situations and think, What mistakes did I make? What do I never want to do again? I haven't made every right move in the book, but I can guarantee that if I made one false move, I didn't make it again.

Q7

PLAYBOY: Let's finally set the record straight. Were you ever Drew Barrymore's nude body double?
PRESSLY: Drew plays Ivy in the first Poison Ivy film, and in Poison Ivy 2, Alyssa Milano plays the art student who moves into Ivy's old room in a house with other students. She finds a diary and pictures of Drew's character in a closet; the pictures are supposed to be of Drew, but they're of me, though you never see my face. When Alyssa reads Ivy's diary--Drew's diary--she imagines her, but instead of Ivy being Drew, she's me. People say I body-doubled her and it was my boobs and my ass in the movie instead of hers, but that isn't the case. I haven't had a body double myself, but I'm not opposed to it.

Q8

PLAYBOY: You've often been better than the movies you've appeared in, such as Inferno with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Joe Dirt with David Spade. Did you ever get bummed out enough to consider calling it quits?
PRESSLY: I can point out films that made me want to slit my wrists, but I can't say they made me never want to work again. Everybody gets burned-out every once in a while. About four years ago I got super, super burned-out and needed to take a break to enjoy everything I was working so hard for. I got burned-out because you don't want to look pretty all the time; you don't want to dress perfectly all the time. You want to be by yourself and be fine with it. And I did. I gardened, went out with my friends, went to the beach for the weekend. It was good for me. Who's to say I won't be back to that place one day?

Q9

PLAYBOY: What's the dope on performing with the Pussycat Dolls?
PRESSLY: I sang "Fever" the first time I performed with them. It was great, but there was all that anticipation and getting ready, then it was over in a flash. I wanted to run right back out there and do it again.

Q10

PLAYBOY: Being so famously sexy-looking and well-known, what wild fan encounters have you had?
PRESSLY: People come up to me as if they've known me all their life, like we're old pals, so I'm not an asshole to them, you know? But when I had a house on the water in Huntington Beach, California, I went on MTV Cribs and everybody found out where I lived. On Halloween I walked out of the house, and--bingo--50 kids had jumped the fence. That started happening all the time. There were these three guys who would constantly jump over and try to watch me while I slept. I ended up having to move. I'll never do Cribs again.