Post 'Juno,' Thirlby is the not-it girl no longer

Recent successes give young actress ideas for the future

There are certain sacrifices you have to make when you've been recently anointed Rising Indie Movie Star. You might, for instance, have to put off that lesbian werewolf flick you've been kicking around with Ellen Page.

"It would be unlike any film ever made," says Olivia Thirlby, 21, best known for playing Page's best friend in "Juno." "It's just not the right time."

Fair enough. After all, Thirlby - riding the buzz of her latest film, "The Wackness," and looking forward to the release of several others - is aware that the celebrity-gossip hens and media critics who love her now could easily unleash their full snarky fury in response to an experimental movie about gay women and supernatural animals.

"People in Hollywood are kind of fair-weather friends," says the native New Yorker, a tiny package of a person whose moccasin-clad feet don't quite reach the ground when she sinks into a high-backed chair in a Cambridge hotel meeting room. "It feels great now, but it's something I'm trying not to pay attention to."

Thirlby, who landed her first movie role during her last year in high school - in "The Secret," a French film coming out on DVD next month - is enjoying critical praise for her role as a teen seductress in "The Wackness," an homage to nostalgia that won the Sundance Audience Award last winter and opened Friday in Boston.

Set in New York during the sultry summer of 1994, the film chronicles an unlikely friendship between Luke (Josh Peck), a kind-of-a-loser teenage dope dealer who desperately wants some female attention, and Dr. Squires (Sir Ben Kingsley), a middle-aged psychiatrist who exchanges therapy sessions for pot, and is similarly desperate.

Thirlby is Stephanie, the unattainable object of Luke's desire - and Squires's stepdaughter. The actor is a lot like her character, actually ("I said her words and did her actions, but underneath it was just Olivia"), only Stephanie lives life on a whole 'nother plane of popularity.

"She's this girl who is cool to the bone," says Thirlby, who herself exudes the rare confidence of the ultra-hip. "There's nothing she can say or do that isn't cool."

She's also the tiniest bit cruel, but in Thirlby's able hands, says writer and director Jonathan Levine, Stephanie's self-absorption becomes just one more dimension of a complicated personality.

"She allows you to understand her character's motivations in a way that I didn't understand even when I wrote them," he says. "Olivia's character could have come off as unsympathetic, or a caricature, and it's a credit to her that I think her character's very sympathetic in this movie."

Part of playing a summertime siren is shedding clothes - no small hurdle for Thirlby, who today is wearing skinny black jeans and a long, black, perfectly unrevealing tunic.

"I thought I would never do sex scenes. I also thought I would never wear a bikini - in life, let alone on camera," she says. "I guess I'm just private, and possibly very insecure about my body."

She took care of bathing-suit anxiety with exercise, and dealt with the film's steamy moments by limiting the skin she was willing to reveal. "I'm proud that I managed to make beautiful and sexual sex scenes without showing my body very much," she says. Still, it was a leap.

"You have these thoughts like why am I here, what have I done with my life? What is going on? I've made a huge mistake! And then all of a sudden you drop your towel."

Thirlby's brilliant smile and self-deprecating remarks are partly why she's now boasting a raft of adoring blog posts and a growing portfolio of magazine profiles, including one last month in New York magazine.

But she hasn't forgotten what it's like to be the not-it girl. After "The Secret," directors were hardly throwing scripts at her. Her roles included a small part in "United 93" and a quirky teenager in "Snow Angels," a 2007 Sundance film starring Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell that grossed about $400,000. Her parts in upcoming films, including another with Peck ("Safety Glass," starring Hilary Duff), are smallish.

"I've spent the last few years really having to fight for my roles," she says, including an entire year before "Juno" without any work and, early on, a couple of hundred unsuccessful attempts to land commercial spots.

"Out of like 200 auditions I booked three," she says. She pauses. "No - just kidding. It was two. And one wasn't even a real commercial. It was a test commercial for focus groups."

So the hoopla's nice, and she's enjoying the perks that go along with promoting "The Wackness."

"I get to travel and eat lots of food everywhere I go and split my pants and then, you know, go home and have an awesome summer," she says, laughing. "I can't complain."

Emma Brown can be reached at ebrown@globe.com.