Q 1

PLAYBOY: What kind of kid were you, growing up in rural North Carolina?

Jaime 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.

Q 2

PLAYBOY: When did you become more interested in making love, not war?

Jaime 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.

Q 3

PLAYBOY: Once you beat the cooties problem, did you date a lot?

Jaime 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.

Q 4

PLAYBOY: Also when you were 15 you gained legal emancipation from your parents. That's serious business, isn't it?

Jaime 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.

Q 5

PLAYBOY: When you left modeling to tackle TV and movies in the late 1990s, how well did you adjust to Hollywood?

Jaime 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."