With An Eye On. . . : Sometimes the ‘Ready or Not’ girls leave all that angst behind--and just go shopping

They may have just flown in from Montreal and been brought to a Downtown Los Angeles restaurant via limousine, but there’s nothing pretentious about teen-age actors Laura Bertram and Lani Billard, stars of Showtime’s “Ready or Not.”

“Who do you get to interview?” Lani immediately asks a reporter. “Anyone from ‘Friends’?”

Both girls squeal when they are told yes.

“I love him,” Lani declares. “I’m totally in love with him.”

“Which one is he?” Laura asks. “The dark-haired one?”

All the show’s lead actors have dark hair.

“Yes,” Lani answers.

“Oh, he is so cute,” Laura gushes.

Satisfied with answers regarding cute celebs, shopping and dining near Hotel Nikko, where they’ll stay for a three-day publicity jaunt, Lani and Laura settle down to discuss “Ready or Not,” which focuses on adolescent trials and tribulations and enters its fourth season Sunday on Showtime.

Later this month the stars will learn if the show will be picked up for another season.

Laura, 16, and Lani, 15, don’t mind playing 13-year-olds.

“I have a sister that age and she’s going through a lot of stuff Amanda (Laura) and Busy (Lani) are going through,” Laura points out.

In previous seasons, Amanda (the “Ready”) and Busy (the “Not”) dealt with first menstruation, first bras and first kisses. This season, their friendship and their self-identities will be tested.

“Amanda gets very poetic and Busy gets really into her music,” Laura explains. “It’ll be a very trying time for them.”

Lani and Laura share a love of music and singing with their characters. Lani’s an accomplished singer and drummer, and Laura’s an alto-soprano who’s appeared with the Canadian Opera Company.

Laura, who says she’s not as outgoing as Amanda, lives in downtown Toronto and is in the 11th grade. She hopes “to go to university, in case things don’t work out with acting.” The trained ballerina began as a model who later appeared in Canadian productions, including “The Enchantment” for Walt Disney Films.

“Acting’s an option for me, but I don’t want to make it the only thing in my life,” Laura says, picking at the anchovies in her Caesar salad. “I want to be sure I have some other possibilities.”

On the other hand, 10th-grader Lani says, “I’m not sure about university. I just live life day to day and acting is my priority right now.” She started acting at 9 in a Canadian after-school special then co-starred in the science show “Frog.”

Only child Lani’s concerns center on the immediate: When school lets out this summer she hopes to visit the baseball day camp she attended each summer until “Ready or Not” began shooting in the summer of 1992. “I was a CIT (counselor in training) and if I go back this summer, I’ll be a counselor.”

On the other hand, Laura wants to head to England and France before shooting on the CableAce-winning series resumes in July--”that’s if the show gets picked up; that’s what I’m hoping for.”

The teens are not without their concerns regarding the opposite sex.

“I guess you could say I’m boy crazy,” Lani later says over the phone from her home in Thornhill, a suburb of Toronto. “I think Laura’s that way too, but not as much as me.”

The girls shared a good time in Los Angeles: “We went back to Melrose Avenue about 17,000 times to buy things and return them and back again. Then we went to the Beverly Center and basically stayed at Contempo Casuals. We got to eat at Tommy Tang’s and that was just amazing, the best. We just bopped around and had a great time.”

“Ready or Not” airs Sundays at 5 p.m. on Showtime.