Follow Those Girls!
Amid the Hollywood throng of talented young actresses, the author talks to six standouts, who have been shaping their careers in very different ways, parlaying famous last names, Disney hits, and paparazzi pressure into edgier, more grown-up material. Lily Collins, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Isabel Lucas, Amber Heard, and Zoë Kravitz pose as a posse of up-and-coming attractions.

Perhaps you remember her work in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen? Ah yes, she was the android who mounted Shia LaBeouf and strangled him with her tongue. But seriously, Isabel Lucas has a higher purpose. The 24-year-old Australian has worked on irrigation projects in Namibia, raised money for orphanages in India, and paddled out into the Pacific Ocean to combat whaling off of Japan, where she is now wanted for interfering with global commerce. We’ll soon get to see this more soulful side of Lucas in The Pacific, an HBO mini-series about the American-Japanese conflict during World War II, produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. This month she stars in Daybreakers, a futuristic thriller in which she plays human in a world taken over by vampires. After that it’s Red Dawn, a remake of the Cold War–era anti-Commie shoot-’em-up. Lucas takes her “action movie” characters every bit as seriously as the others—even when certain directors don’t. “It’s interesting,” she says, referring to Michael Bay, “when the only direction is ‘You’ve got to be more sexy!’”