Nikki Reed is no longer the messed-up young girl from Thirteen, the breakthrough film which she co-authored with director Catherine Hardwicke, based on her own slippery-slope experiences of an emancipated adolescence. Of course, she never really was that girl, as she’s quick to point out. Refreshingly unguarded during a recent sit-down chat at a Los Angeles hotel, Reed has a sly, astute and furtively confidential tone — when she appends a questioning “you know” to the end of a sentence, it’s not some vacuous, Valley Girl vernacular, but rather an intimate, imploring solicitation of deeper agreement and common ground.

Reed’s most recent films — Mini’s First Time and Cherry Crush, the latter of which hits DVD in a few weeks — didn’t catch fire at the box office, but with a Kevin Smith television pilot (Reaper) and a couple more indie flicks in the can (Familiar Strangers, Privileged), the 19-year-old Reed stands poised to make another full-frontal assault on Hollywood in the near future, all with an eye toward eventually writing and producing more of her own projects. “I didn’t know I was going to act until four years ago,” Reed says. “I did Thirteen and was like, ‘Whoah, that was cool, what a funny mistake.’ And then all of a sudden I moved out and couldn’t go back to school and that was my only choice. So I acted to pay the bills. Now I’m acting because I enjoy it. And that’s all I can say about it, because it’s not going to be the rest of my life.” For the full feature piece/interview, from FilmStew, click here.