Tara Reid: An Easy Reid

While most serious young actresses are exceedingly wary of being sexually exploited on-screen and being typecast as sexpots, 22-year-old Tara Reid has no such fears. In her feature film debut, she played a bikini-clad young trophy wife who delivers the memorable line, "I'll suck your cock for a thousand dollars."

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Of course, there were mitigating circumstances: the movie wasn't a cheesy straight-to-video sexfest, it was Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big Lebowski. How did she get cast? "My audition scene was the famous one where I say the 'suck' line to Jeff Bridges. I have on this little leather dress. Joel and Ethan Coen are sitting on the couch, and I'm swinging my foot in the casting director's face. Joel and Ethan are cracking up as I'm doing the reading because they love their own writing. Then all of a sudden I look at the casting director and say, 'I'll suck your cock for a thousand dollars.' And they lost it."

The Big Lebowski may not have been a hit, but Reid's contribution to it certainly was. "Everyone says it to me, come on Tara, I'll give you a thousand dollars to say the line," she reports. No surprise, then, that she was hired to play a budding Dr. Ruth-ish radio sex therapist in the college campus thriller Urban Legend. She welcomes the opportunity to let some steam off on-screen again. "I can make a scene that's not supposed to be sexy, very sexy," she explains. "It's a power you're born with. It's not a physical thing, it comes from the inside. It's all in the eyes."

Reid may not have the trepidations other actresses her age do, but she takes her chosen work no less seriously: she loves acting. "You can do anything you want and there are no laws, no boundaries, no worrying that people might look at you funny," she declares. "Acting is almost like a drug--it's addictive. Once you get a taste for it, you fiend for it. It's the one thing in life that really makes me happy."

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Katie Ryo