Jamie Pressly

Q1

PLAYBOY: What kind of kid svere you, growing up in rural North Carolina? PRESSLY: I was a very ambitious and ath­letic kid. My mom was a dance teacher, so I grew up taking dance classes, which I loved. I took voice lessons, was a majorette and twirled a damn baton. Lots of the girls in North Carolina were tough. You have your prissy, etiquette-minded Southern belles, but then you have the hot tomboys. My dad called me "the prissy tomboy." I grew up near the water. I'd wear a dress but then run outside and be like one of the guys, jumping onto a boat, fishing, getting dirty and playing war.

Q2

PLAYBOY: When did you become more interested in making love, not war? PRHSSI.Y: I was always flirting with the guys, but I guess I really noticed them freshman year in high school when everybody's hormones are raging and you suddenly look like a totally different person. I saw the guys in my grade as friends, but there was a whole slew of cute older guys in football and

baseball uniforms. It wasn't so much their looking at me as my looking at them. I was out of my cootie phase.

Q3

PLAYBOY: Once you beat the cooties problem, did you date a lot? 1'RHSSLY: I've always been into long relationships, but I didn't have a normal high school experience. I moved to California in 1992 and spent the first semester of my sophomore year in Costa Mesa. When we left North Carolina, it was kind of a joke around town; people said, "Oh, she'll be back in a couple of years." But I left school and went to Japan on a modeling contract when I was 15.

Q4

PLAYBOY: Also when you were 15 you gained legal emancipation from your parents. That's serious business, isn't it? PRESSLY: People try to shed a derogatory light on that situation, as if it was a Macaulay Culkin kind of thing when I divorced my parents. But my parents were in the middle of a divorce and going through sort of a midlife crisis after being married for 21 years. I was

in hormone hell, so going to Japan on a modeling contract seemed like a great escape. Neither of my parents could come with me, and in order to get out of school for that semester and go on my own without a legal guardian, the child labor laws said 1 needed to be an emancipated minor. My parents signed away legal guardianship, and I went with my mother to the court and spoke to the judge, who understood that it was more about my going to work than anything else. It wasn't about my parents; it was about my wanting to get the hell out of Dodge.

Q

PLAYBOY: When you left modeling to tackle TV and movies in the late 1990s, how well did you adjust to Hollywood? I'RESSLY: I'm not somebody who has to compete with other people, but I'm very competitive with myself. It's always "How far can I go? How great can I do it?" I never got catty with any of the other girls up for the same jobs. Instead, I befriended them. I would go into a room on an audition with 10 other girls (continued on fhige IIS)

JAIME PRESSLY

{continued from page 71)

mere and always De me tirst one to say hi. To me, it's always "May the best man win."

Q6

PLAYBOY: One of your first movies was Poison Ivy: The New Seduction, in which you're often nude.

pressi.Y: That was my first big role, and all of a sudden they were going, 'Jaime, we're going to add some things, like this scene is going to be topless and then

this scene__" 1 was so new, I didn't

know my rights at all. I locked myself in my dressing room and called my lawyer: "Look, they're adding scenes. They want to do lower frontal nudity. I don't want to do that." It was a scary situation, but at the same time I will say I don't ever look back and regret anything. I look at situations and think. What mistakes did I make? What do I never want to do again? I haven't made every right move in the book, but I can guarantee that if I made one false move, I didn't make it again.

Q7

playboy: Let's finally set the record straight. Were you ever Drew Barry-more's nude body double? pressly: Drew plays Ivy in the first Poi­son Ivy film, and in Poison Ivy 2, Alyssa Milano plays the art student who moves into Ivy's old room in a house with other students. She finds a diary and pictures of Drew's character in a closet; the pictures are supposed to be of Drew, but they're of me, though you never see my face. When Alyssa reads Ivy's diary—Drew's diary—she imag­ines her, but instead of Ivy being Drew, she's me. People say I body-doubled her and it was my boobs and my ass in the movie instead of hers, but that isn't the case. I haven't had a body double myself, but I'm not opposed to it.

Q8

playboy: You've often been better than the movies you've appeared in, such as Inferno with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Joe Dili with David Spade. Did you ever get bummed out enough to con­sider calling it quits? PRKssiY: I can point out films that made me want to slit my wrists, but I can't say they made me never want to work again. Everybody gets burned-out every once in a while. About four years ago I got super, super burned-out and needed to take a break to enjoy everything I was working so hard for. I got burned-out because you don't want to look pretty all the time; you don't want to dress perfectly all the time. You want to be by yourself and be fine with it. And I did. I gardened, went out with my friends.

went to the beach for the weekend. It was good for me. Who's to say I won't be back to that place one day?

Q9

playboy: What's the dope on performing with the Pussycat Dolls? I'RKSSI.Y: I sang "Fever" the first time I performed with them. It was great, but there was all that anticipation and get­ting ready, then it was over in a flash. I wanted to run right back out there and do it again.

Q10

I'I.vyboY: Being so famously sexy-looking and well-known, what wild fan encoun­ters have you had?

l'RKSsi.Y People come up to me as if they've known me all their life, like we're old pals, so I'm not an asshole to them, you know? But when I had a house on the water in Huntington Beach, California, I went on MTV Cribs and everybody found out where I lived. On Halloween I walked out of the house, and—bingo—50 kids had jumped the fence. That started hap­pening all the time. There were these three guys who would constantly jump over and try to watch me while I slept. I ended up having to move. I'll never do Cribs again.

Q11

playboy: Does the increasing respect and fame you've earned through My Name Is Earl make you want to tackle something really bold and sexual like, say, a Monster's Ball} prkssi.Y: Anybody who does comedy probably wants to try something like Monster's Ball because thai film has a deep, serious dramatic character who has a million levels to her. Yeah, there are nude scenes, and yeah, there is a lot of sex in it, but you don't leave that movie thinking, Oh my God, Halle Berry was naked and having sex. You leave it going. Wow, that was a gnarly film. I still want to do a great dramatic role, and I'm waiting for it to come along. And it will.

Q12

playboy: Have your Emmy and Screen Actors Guild award nominations changed things for you?

pressly: They lifted people's eyebrows a little, yeah. Even if I never win, being nominated after all these years of pound­ing the pavement changed everybody's outlook. Even before the nominations, though, people had (hanged their tune. They allowed me 10 grow up. A lot of times when somebody appears in men's magazines, people in the business want to put her in a box and say, "This is what you are." But they let me out of my box and allowed me to change my image.

Q13

If filming My Name Is F.nrl didn't keep you so busy, on what other show-would you like to moonlight? PREssi.V: If only Cheers would come back. That was one of my favorites of all time, along with Designing Women. The writing was different on those older shows. Plus, I prefer working in an ensemble cast. It's more interesting to have somebody lo bounce off. Also you get to split the workload.

Q14

playboy: Does doing a hit network show ever become a grind? pressi.Y: They have me on My Name Is Earl for as long as the show goes. The whole point is not to go through life doing a job that feels like a grind, because then you're not happy. When you play the same character over and over, people don't realize you're still an actor. They think you are that charac­ter and that's all you can do. Doing dif­ferent things is what makes you stand out. I want to play different characters and show a different side. 1 didn't go into this business to find a character and stick to it.

Q15

PLAYBOY: You're obviously good at multi­tasking—you're currently juggling acting, motherhood, your live-in rela­tionship with DJ Eric Cubiche and your fashion line, Jaime.

prkssi.Y: I'm better at doing 10 things at a time than I am at doing just one. But when you try to do 20 things at a time, you start to half-ass it and things fall apart. Luckily, at J'aime I have a great team that helps me get everything done; otherwise I'd be a mess. Because the company isn't licensed out—it's owned solely by me and financed by me—it's a lot different from other celebrity clothing lines. It's my money, so I worry about everything. We make everything in America, not overseas, so our cost is a little bit more, but then again, I can't watch everything if it's being made overseas.

Q16

piayboy: Do you worry that your fans will desert you now that you're a mother and settled down with one guy? prksm.Y: Unavailable people are usu­ally the ones others find most attrac­tive. Even when you were single in high school or college, did you ever notice you couldn't get arrested? When you're with somebody and finally happy, every­body starts coming out of the woodwork and suddenly all these hot people want to date you. Besides, a lot of people think mothers are sexy, especially when you can hold a baby on your hip and your body is totally ripped.

Q17

playboy: The nature of the business keeps you and your boyfriend fre­quently apart. How does that affect your relationship?

prkssi.V: Absence makes the heart grow fonder only at first. Then it makes the heart mad and it goes, "Fuck you," and walks off with somebody else. If you go on location when you have children, you have to make sure you're with a significant other who's as flexible scheduling-wise as you are, or it's never going to work.

Q18

playboy: How big a struggle is fidel­ity, especially when you're constantly surrounded by other great-looking people on movie and TV sets? prkssi.Y: Any pussy can cheat. Any weak person can cheat. It takes a real man or a real adult or a real woman, a stand-up person, to realize what they have and not do that. The thing about the saying "Whatever happens in Vegas slays in Vegas" is that it never does stay in Vegas. Everybody Finds out.

Q19

playboy: What famous woman would you like to make out with?

I'RKSM.V: I'd be lying through my teeth and trying to be sexy if 1 gave you an answer to that. Like, "Oooh, what would sound really sexy right now?" I have to say I would not make out with a woman. I can't even imagine it. Angelina Jolie is the all-purpose answer, but 1 don't want to make out with her. She's hot, and I'm definitely the chick who sees women and goes, "Look at her boobs!" or "What a great ass!" but 1 do not want to touch them or make out with them.

Q20

playboy: Why do so many women like going to strip clubs? pressi.Y: Because there's no competition or threat. I mean, I see a hot woman, and what is she going to do, rape me? My girlfriends and I love going to strip clubs where we sit down with drinks while hot chicks walk around and aren't bitchy. In a regular club, the women are assholes—everybody's in competition. You go into a strip club and it's like everybody's free-spirited, open-minded. It's safe.

Read the 21st question at playboy.com/21q.

THE SEXY STAR OF MY NAME IS EARL TALKS ABOUT HER TOMBOY PAST, RELIVES HER

DAYS IN HORMONE HELL, EXPLAINS WHY ONLY PUSSIES CHEAT (AND WHY CHEATERS

ALWAYS GET CAUGHT) AND TELLS WHY SHE FEELS SAFEST IN A STRIP CLUB