Rachael Leigh Cook had no qualms about playing the ugly duckling opposite heartthrob Freddie Prinze Jr. in She's All That, a romantic comedy about love and popularity in a cliquey Los Angeles high school. In fact, she tells Dish, "I've had a couple of parts where they've nastied me up, which is fine by me."

The camera must really love Cook, considering she says she looked much worse in real life than she does on film. "People were, like, 'You weren't nasty enough,' but when I was there I felt pretty rank," says the actress. "I had this Tom Snyder unibrow thing going, and this nasty wig that was entirely too long and acrylic and scratchy."

So what inspired the up-and-comer to take on such a role? Certainly not the plot - it's admittedly a fairly predictable tale of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. But Cook says that predictability "is the beauty of it. It was a happy movie. I like happy movies."

For someone who likes happy movies, Cook seems a little skeptical of real-life happy relationships. "If you're me, you start to get either extremely morbid and you think one of you is going to be tragically killed - because that's what happens in movies - or you think that you're about to get your heart broken."

While Cook's morbid streak might not be evident in She's All That, it served her well in another acting gig - an anti-heroin public service announcement in which she uses a frying pan to destroy an entire kitchen. The spot was not as fun to shoot as it looked, says Cook: "I've never broken anything on purpose in my life."