Meagan Good: she used to turn on the drama while her policeman father was off at work—which makes her breakout role all the more ironic

As a child, Meagan Good would scream at the top of her lungs, fall down the stairs, fake a broken leg, and run from an imagined killer chasing after her. With such an overactive imagination, it's no wonder this born drama queen began acting in commercials at the ripe old age of 4.

That theatricality continues to serve the 25-year-old actress well in this month's Brick, a John Hughes-meets-Raymond Chandler-esque high school murder mystery. The movie utilizes old-school-film-noir verbal flourishes to tell the tale of a loner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) searching to uncover what happened to the girl he loved. "When I first read the script I had no idea what they were talking about," Good laughs, acknowledging that although her father was a crime fighter, he certainly never spoke like Sam Spade.

As Kara, the ex-girlfriend of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Brendan, Good says her character is "the oracle of the movie. She sees all the angles, has all the answers, but because she's been scorned, she sends Gordon-Levitt's character on a wild goose chase for the truth." While the dialogue took some getting used to, Good admits that she understood her femme fatale role: "I knew what could drive a girl like that."

Jarret McNeill wrote about Mary Elizabeth Winstead in the February issue.

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