The Verge: Laura Ramsey

In Middle Men, Laura Ramsey plays a woman who parlays an ignoble beginning (selling sex on the internet) into a lucrative business, and in some ways, it's a fortuitous match of actress and character. Ramsey, too, paid her dues in productions she'd probably rather forget (like MTV's reality flop The Real Cancun), but she's since built a promising career as an actress, with notable appearances in projects like The Ruins, The Covenant, and Mad Men. She called up Movieline to talk about fake online profiles, and donning a sailor hat for Sofia Coppola.

Now, you're playing a porn star in this movie, but do you feel like you have to give this disclaimer to people? Because you're really not doing anything that porny at all in the movie.

Yeah! I mean, it sounds bad that I'm playing a porn star, but I don't have any nudity and it's actually done in a very fun way. It's more about the business than it is about porn or sex. I'll just warn people, it's not as bad as it sounds. [Laughs]

I mean, I think the boys in The Covenant showed more skin than you do in Middle Men.

Yeah. I mean, I did The Ruins and I showed more in that than I do in this film, and this one is about porn, which doesn't make any sense at all. But I'm very thankful for it.

As an actress, what is it like to play a porn star when we have so many porn stars becoming actresses, like Sasha Grey?

I think for me, I just wanted to understand the business side of it. I get taking your clothes off and doing those sort of things in front of a camera, but I wanted to understand the mindset of the girls. I sat down with a couple who actually do this for a living, and it's so interesting because the main thing they told me was that it's a business. They're actually very savvy women, and they run their own business and take their own pictures and do their own websites, then they go on these little press tours and their fanbase gets to meet them. I could relate to them as an actor -- at the end of the day, we both dress up and put a wardrobe on and go do our jobs, but when I talked to them, they were just regular girls hanging out in sweatpants. So as far as porn stars becoming actresses, good for them! A lot of them are actually very good actresses. [Laughs]

Audrey is all about using the internet to her advantage. Now that actresses can promote themselves via things like Twitter, do you take advantage of the internet at all? I found one Twitter under your name that's promising to learn how to tweet eventually.

Oh, no. Well, there you go, that's the first time someone's told me about that. [Laughs] There's even two people on Facebook pretending to be me. People comment to me, "Hey, I've friended you, and you haven't friended me back!" I'm just like, "Uh, I've never actually been on Facebook." There's also a fanpage on there that somebody made that I haven't done myself.

Do you just stand back and let it happen, or does it concern you at all that people might be impersonating you online?

Well of course, but there's nothing I can really do about it. Unless you know somebody who knows somebody who can take those things away, once they're up there, they're up there. You don't have control. The internet is so big that no one can control anything, really. When it's out, it's out.

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