Actress Jennifer Rubin Is Finally Headed in the Right Direction

Jennifer Rubin admits she wasn’t a very good student--at least not in geography.

“I lived in Arizona and I thought Florida was in California because I thought oranges came from the same place,” Rubin said. “And then when I went to New York to model, every agency looked at me and said, ‘Do you want to go Paris?’ I would go, ‘Yeah.’ But as soon as I walked out I’d say, ‘ Yeech, I don’t want to go to Paris,’ because I didn’t know where Paris was.”

And once she got to Paris, all she thought about was going home. “Most of my preoccupation was that the United States would blow up and no one (in Paris) would know. It seemed so far away. I comforted myself with a few croissants too many and came back to New York too fat.”

Rubin, 27, now calls Los Angeles home. Over the past four years, she has made more than a dozen movies, including “Permanent Record” and “The Doors,” in which she played Warhol protegee Edie Sedgwick: “I talked to Bob Dylan at a party about her. It was pretty cool. He was neat. He just kind of gave me his approval without saying anything.”

Her two latest films surface next week: “Drop Dead Gorgeous,” a thriller in which she plays a model, premieres Wednesday on USA Network and the feature “Delusion” opens Friday.

“We shot ‘Delusion’ in the middle of the desert and outside of Las Vegas where they did those underground nuclear bomb testings,” Rubin says. “So I only ate oysters and drank coffee because I didn’t want to turn into a mutant.”

Rubin modeled for nearly three years and detested every minute of it: “I was miserable. They put all that makeup on you and you look 35 when you’re 19.”

She decided to try her luck at acting when she overheard someone say actress Phoebe Cates had once been a model. “I just kind of followed suit,” Rubin says. “So I have Phoebe to blame.”