While some of her contemporaries cycle in and out of rehab, or simply turn down everything that comes their way (I’m looking in your general direction, Rachel McAdams), the Jacinda Barretts and Jessica Biels of young Hollywood are busy making a play for their heat.

Biel is particularly intriguing as a candidate for newly minted star, if only because probably no one saw her coming. This week she’s starring in the big-budget if somewhat bland Next, with Nicolas Cage, and she’s also got the safety net of Dennis Dugan’s big dumb gay firefighters comedy, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, starring Adam Sandler and Kevin James. In between she’s been trying to shore up her dramatic cred, with movies like The Illusionist (an important booking for her) and Bruce Beresford’s set-to-lens adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance, whose lead Biel is taking over from Linsday Lohan.

The femininity is there, but what Biel seemingly lacks is a certain softness, and relaxed charisma. Next doesn’t necessarily require it, save for a single scene with some Native American children, but if Biel is to make inroads to the sort of relatable leading lady parts that pay the truly big bucks (glossy romantic comedies and the like), she needs to dial down the energy a bit and vacuum herself free of the sort of cow-faced, sign-posted emoting that too much serial television work seems to engender in many young actors and actresses.

If she can’t pull that off — and there’s not much to suggest one way or another whether she can — there is an alternative, and that’s to embrace the whole authoritative, beautiful-shit-kicker persona she projects. Biel is still running from this 7th Heaven-era photo shoot, no doubt, but would be wise to embrace hard-edged bombshell roles in a way that Ashley Judd did early in her career.

Biel got convincingly buff in 2004’s Blade: Trinity, but has since avoided nudity, with lingering bedsheets, perfectly balanced, during post-coital kisses goodbye in London, The Illusionist and, now, Next. Judd, on the other hand, evidenced a much more casual attitude about undress, and that approach counterbalanced her toughened qualities while also allowing a (now-estimable) vulnerability to mature and ripen. Biel could perhaps learn a thing or two from that.