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Since first stepping into the limelight, 20-year-old Britney Spears has adopted an array of personas to match her comprehensive wardrobe of costumes. First, at age 11, she was the sweet and apple-cheeked Mouseketeer. Fast forward to her 1999 debut album, ... Baby One More Time, and she was the sexy-but-innocent student in parochial-school skirt and thigh-highs. She then morphed into curious adolescent, cabaret performer and sexually confident woman, among other guises, in the two years leading up to her latest album, Britney.
But while suppressing the milk-and-cookies everyteen image in favor of something a lot more adult-oriented with such songs as "I'm a Slave 4 U" and "Boys," obstacles remain in her transformation from naive pop tart to sultry sex symbol (after all, she is just talking about dancing in those songs). Britney's most personal LP yet dilutes the sexually suggestive tracks with more wholesome fare, such as the hot-date jitterbug "Anticipating" and fairy tale crush "Bombastic Love."
Britney's latest single, "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet A Woman," best describes her dichotomous state as someone who intends to prove she's a grown-up living in the spotlight while keeping tethered to a past rooted in rural Kentwood, Louisiana. The song doubles as a summation of her feature film debut, "Crossroads," which opens February 15. In it, Britney slips into her most well-suited role since she really was "that innocent" as Lucy, who, along with two friends, vacates her small town on a cross-country quest to find her estranged mother (played by Kim Cattrall of "Sex and the City") and enter a music contest in Los Angeles. Along the way, she finds love and experiences the first confused pangs of adulthood If Lucy's rite of passage veers a bit close to home, it's because Britney helped concoct "Crossroads" from her own life experiences.
"The fact that Lucy wanted to get away from her small town [is a similarity between her and me]," she said. "Her excuse at the time was to go see her mother, but in her heart she knew she was on her way to be in the contest � I can kind of relate to that to a certain extent, with me going off and leaving my small town. But other than that, the character is totally different from me. She was probably me four years ago, but not now. Lucy is very naive and shy. She's to herself a lot, but the thing I really like about Lucy is that she's very strong."
Despite the dissimilarities between Britney and her character, during a scene set at a karaoke bar with Lucy performing "I Love Rock 'N Roll," a #1 hit for Joan Jett in 1982, she simply couldn't keep the two separate.
"That was a lot of fun," she said. "I had been on tour forever, and all of a sudden I stopped for like four months [to work on the movie], so it had been a while since I'd performed. I got up on the little stage and was like, 'OK, I'm coming back.' It felt cool. I think there was a little [more] Britney in that and not so much Lucy."
While the film offers plenty in terms of introspective realization, "Crossroads" is also a quintessential road movie/buddy flick. Along their interstate jaunt, Lucy and her friends' interpersonal ties are strengthened in a way only endless hours on the road and atypical adventures in foreign places can provide.
"When I was younger, I had my three best friends � Jansen, Courtney, Laura Lynne. To this day I still have them. The whole concept came out of me being with my girlfriends and us growing up with each other. I wanted to do a teen movie, but I wanted to do something that teenagers could watch and be touched by. And all of them have their own little issues, but at the same time they have each other at the end of the day. That's what matters. We all have our problems, but if we have friends we can talk with about them, it makes you feel safe."After having passed on several scripts, Britney decided to enter the big-screen realm because she felt the time had come to lend her talent to a new medium (she had already co-authored two books with her mother, Lynne: "Britney Spears' Heart to Heart" [2000] and "A Mother's Gift" [2001]). Although butterflies fluttered in her stomach just thinking about the film's production, once the director screamed, "Action!," her innate starpower took over.
"I was so nervous," she said of her first day on set. "It's so weird; when I'm onstage and I'm performing, I feel so comfortable, but [filmmaking] was a territory I was new at. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but once on the set and in [costume], you're in character. All your surroundings really help you get into character and it just fell into place."
No matter how confident she felt after the snap of the slate, one scene in particular made her a bit uneasy: her first big-screen kiss.
"I did not like it," the girlfriend of 'NSYNC's Justin Timberlake confessed of smooching co-star Anson Mount, who plays Ben. "No, it was fine, just a little awkward. All the cameras are around and you're like, 'OK, I'm going to kiss this guy. I can't believe I'm doing this.' It's just a little weird afterwards, but it was cool 'cause we just laughed it off."
Kissing on camera certainly has its pitfalls � open vs. closed mouth, too much/not enough tongue, interlocking braces � and Britney's liplock wasn't without its foul calamity, but it was nothing a prank and a little Listerine couldn't cure.
"I had some tuna fish before we did the scene because I was hungry � a girl's gotta eat, right? So after I ate the damn tuna fish, I noticed [Anson] was a little perturbed about it because my breath was going to be kind of skanky. So I was like, 'Oh god, he's kind of mad.' I put some perfume on and freshen up, and go to kiss him and he had garlic in his mouth. So I went to kiss him and I'm like, 'Oh my gosh!' It was the worst experience. It was horrible. Afterwards, of course, I had to laugh it off, but to this day I'm not really happy with that. And I think they actually used the take where he has garlic in his mouth because it shows me laughing afterwards."
As the release of "Crossroads" neared, Britney was a bit uneasy anticipating the reaction her feature film debut would elicit. And who can blame her, considering many are still chuckling over the last couple of offerings from pop-star-turned-actors: Mariah Carey's "Glitter" and 'NSYNC's Lance Bass and Joey Fatone's "On the Line." But it's not critics' opinions that have her stomach in knots. In fact, she'll worry even more if the flick is heralded by the press. "Crossroads" is Britney's self-expressive gift to her fans and theirs is the only response of any concern to her.
"I'm a little nervous, but my whole thing is if the critics like it, I'll be really worried because everything they like, I hate and everything the critics hate, I love. If my fans can go and be touched in some way, that's all that matters to me.
"I hope [my fans] go and see the movie. [It makes you] laugh, cry and appreciate your friends. After the movie, you just want to hug your girlfriends and say, 'I love you.' And if you could do that after seeing this movie, I've succeeded."