Sara Paxton's new role has bite

SHE'S supremely spunky and always up for a laugh, but 23-year-old Sara Paxton is under no illusions as to where she sits on the Hollywood ladder.

"I want to do everything," says the California girl who started out as a kid alongside Jim Carrey in 1997's Liar Liar.

"But it's a hard business. There's so many actresses, there's so many good actresses, there's so many pretty actresses ... It's really hard to break into that club where you're at the top and getting offered amazing roles. I'm not there yet. I would like to be there. As long as I keep working and doing my best, hopefully some day I'll get there."

It wasn't until she was 17 that Paxton decided acting was more than just a fun sideline. Still, she's crammed in a lot since.

"I'm fortunate to always be working. There hasn't been a time when I'm bored and sad," she says. "Being young, everything's like, 'More, more, more!' Sometimes my mum will be like, 'Don't get down, you've done a lot, you're fine'. But I like to keep going."

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Paxton is speaking from a Pittsburgh hotel where she's making an as-yet-untitled romantic comedy that's also a musical.

"I grew up singing and dancing, but I haven't done this choreographed Glee stuff in years - it's a crash-course reminder," she laughs. "I've been doing so many horror movies the past few years that when this came around, I was like, 'Yeah, it's different'."

Those horror films include 2009's The Last House on the Left in which she endured some harrowing scenes. Her latest is Shark Night 3D - teens in bikinis attacked by sharks! It may be another horror movie on her resum aac, but she gets something different out of each one.

"Shark Night, it was much more of an action movie to me," she says. "I had never done so many stunts and action sequences. We trained with Navy SEALs, learning to do all the underwater fight sequences."

Such rough 'n' tumble is "a rude shock for me every single project I do", she says. "I read the script and I'm like, 'Yeah, fun!' Then when we're actually doing it I'm like, 'Ohhh, hard work, hard work'."

Wearing a bikini "all day, every day" in front of the crew was another thing for which Paxton wasn't prepared - "But by the end it was sort of unnaturally natural".

She admits to "freaking out" during long periods of underwater shooting and hasn't been near a body of water since. "I'm scared of sharks to begin with, even before this movie came around," she says.

So why on earth did she do Shark Night?

"Like I said, every time I'm like, 'Oooh, speedboats! Summertime! Fun!' Then they're like, 'Get in the crocodile-infested lake' and I'm like, 'What? That wasn't in the script!' "

SEE Shark Night 3D opens today

Filed Under: Sara Paxton

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