From Jacksonville to Hollywood and a hit movie

It was midway through her senior year at Wolfson High School, and Ashley Greene had leaving on her mind."Christmas break, I just kind of left," she says. "I didn't really want to highly publicize that, yeah, 'I'm going to California to try to become an actress.' But it ended up getting around. Nobody can keep anything secret in high school."Her plan seems to be working out just fine.Greene plays high school vampire Alice Cullen in the hotly anticipated hit Twilight and has signed to start work on the sequel. She's modeling high fashion in CosmoGirl. And she's giving steamy come-hither looks in the new Maxim, where the headline says "Blood Lust," and big print features the teasing words: "Sometimes I wish I had a boyfriend."Young, beautiful, talented and in demand: After scrapping for work, Greene says she's now able to pick and choose from many offers.Greene wants to be in an action movie, after the high-flying wire stunts in Twilight ("It's like being in a roller coaster, except there's no coaster around you"). She wants to be Wonder Woman. She wants to do serious drama. She wants to be in a Marvel Comics film. She wants to do a period piece, in costume.And she really, really wants to be a Bond girl.Just one problem: "I don't know if I'm old enough yet. But give me time."Greene turned 21 while shooting Twilight in rainy Oregon, but there weren't enough hours in the day for a big celebration. She had a 5 a.m. call time for the next day and little interest in sleeping through it. But co-stars Jackson Rathbone and Kellan Lutz had other plans: "They dragged me out, we had a shot, then went back home and to sleep."But that's almost ancient history."I can't believe it," Greene says. "I turn 22 in February. They're right - time flies so fast."The big discoverySpeaking from Shreveport, La., where she's making Skateland, a coming-of-age story set in the 1980s, she's friendly and chatty, and lets a scheduled 10-minute interview carry on for 40 minutes.Hollywood's fine, she says. But she misses her hometown, her beloved Florida Gators, the water, the beaches, the heat. And there's more: "There are certain things they don't have in L.A., which drive me nuts," she says. "Barbecue and shrimp sauce at Japanese steak houses, and clear soup at Japanese restaurants. I miss it."Greene grew up in Middleburg and Jacksonville, and went to University Christian School before transferring to Wolfson in 10th grade. She was a cheerleader at University Christian, then cheered for an all-star competition squad. She won awards in tae kwan do. Acting and dance classes took up hours every day. She was in honors classes. She worked as a restaurant hostess. She modeled."I was a pretty good kid," she says. "I didn't really have a boyfriend, really, until I was probably 16, which my parents were thrilled about. I was like, 'I have no time for boys,' and my dad was, 'Yes, I think you're right.' "Her only sibling, her brother Joe, 23, says she became interested in acting while in high school; she wasn't the kind of kid who was always performing skits in front of a video camera. That's when she started talking about going to California - she had an agent and a manager, and they said that's where she needed to be."I think we all had confidence that she had all the skills and attitude to be one of the people who actually makes it out there, that it's something she'd fall into," Joe Greene says. "She's always been a social butterfly - even though she's pretty, she's still real nice."The big stepWhen she left Jacksonville, Ashley Greene was 17, with a semester left in school but enough credits to graduate. She headed for California to share an apartment with a couple of other aspiring actresses from Jacksonville. And she had the support of her parents, Joe, who owns a concrete construction business, and Michele, who works for an insurance company."I think it was more gutsy for my parents than it was for me," she says. "It was what I wanted to do; it seemed logical to me. But my parents, for them to think, 'Oh yeah, we'll support you doing that at 17' - that was a gutsy move for them. A lot of parents thought they were crazy, but they trusted me."At first her mother went to California for a couple of weeks to help her get set up: water, power, that kind of thing. "I had no idea what any of that stuff was," Greene says. "You don't realize how easy it is living with your parents."And it wasn't easy for her parents to let her go; they'd seen the movies about the perils of Hollywood."It was scary," Michele Greene says. "There were a lot of late nights where we lay in bed and talked about it. But it's kind of a Catch-22: If you raise your kid to follow their dreams, you're kind of on the hook."They kept in touch, daily. Sometimes even more often: Ashley would occasionally get lost on the way to appointments in L.A., then call her mother in Jacksonville, who would look on the computer and tell her where to turn.Ashley's father said his wife and daughter still talk on the phone just about every day. "I go to bed many nights and they're on the phone, and my wife comes to bed two hours later."After a slow start - her father says he almost made her come home, several times - she started getting TV roles. Then while she was home last Christmas, Ashley learned she had landed her star-making turn in Twilight."That was a good Christmas," Michele Greene says.The big breakAs Alice, Ashley Greene wears a short wig, contacts and makeup that gives her a vampirish pallor. "But I was pretty much that pale. I stayed out of the sun for a couple of months, then they put sunscreen on us, and then I was in Portland (Ore.). I didn't get any sun for six months."The transformation worked, at least in the opinion of Twilight author Stephenie Meyer, who told the Los Angeles Times that when she saw a picture of Greene, she thought: "You found Alice! Oh my gosh."As Alice, Greene will have even bigger roles if all four books in Meyer's series get turned into films. "I don't die, which is good," she said. "I'm in all the books."In interviews, Greene often talks about Jacksonville and her family. She came home for Thanksgiving and is coming back for Christmas. She's encouraging her brother to move to California after he's finished at the University of North Florida, to try acting and to be near her.She even took her brother as her date to the Hollywood premiere of Twilight. He remembers photographers yelling at him to get out of the picture, and thousands of fans screaming non-stop.Ashley Greene admits the sudden fame sometimes seems unreal."There are certain points where I can actually sit down, where I can breathe, when I'm not working. Over the [Thanksgiving] break I was talking to my mom and I'm like, 'What is going on? How did this happen?' "matt.soergel@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4082

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