This Preteen Actor Is Charting Her Own Course

With Jena Malone, everyone just knew.

She herself knew at the age of 4 that she wanted to be an actress. (“I’d go to movies and then go home and reenact them.”) At age 10, she knew she was ready to start going on auditions. The people working on her first project, a student film, knew she was special and told their friends in Los Angeles.

Eventually, she made her way into the casting office for the lead role of the sexually abused young girl in last year’s cable movie “Bastard Out of Carolina.” When she finished her reading, those watching said, “Wow.”

“I went home and told my mom that I just knew I was going to get it,” says Malone, 12, who is nominated for a CableACE Award for the part, competing Nov. 15 against actresses Helen Mirren, Alfre Woodard, Blythe Danner and Bonnie Bedellia.

Those who don’t know her yet have another chance. Malone stars in “Hope” on TNT Sunday night. Portraying Lilly Kate Burns, an aspiring dancer in the South of 1962, the film not only is a coming-of-age story but also manages to deal poignantly with race issues and the Cuban missile crisis. It is the first film directed by Goldie Hawn, who knew--naturally--that she wanted Malone right away.

“There’s a lot about this character that I identified with,” Hawn says, “and I had lived with the script for a long time. I met Jena, I fell in love and then I found out we had the same birthday and it was like a cosmic connection. We have that between us. She was the first one I looked at for the part, and the last one.”

Perhaps not since Jodie Foster (whom Malone played as a child in “Contact”) has a young actress come along with such self-assurance, almost bizarre maturity (“She was placed on this Earth with information,” Hawn says) and astounding talent.

She is already making thoughtful, even provocative, choices about a career she hopes will be as long and varied as Foster’s. While her agents begged her to take parts in commercial fare like “Volcano,” “Air Force One” and the new remake of “The Parent Trap,” Malone instead opted for projects like “Bastard,” Showtime’s “Hidden in America” (playing the daughter of a homeless Beau Bridges), the Dec. 14 CBS movie “Ellen Foster” (with Julie Harris) and “Hope.”

“Playing me doesn’t interest me; I’d rather learn and experience new things,” she says. “I don’t think I’m seen as a child actor but just as an actor.”

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She may look like a normal almost-teen, dressed this day in blue jeans and a black T-shirt. And she insists that in many ways she is. (She roller-blades, she talks on the phone with her friends.) But clearly she has ambition and perspective to burn.

Where it came from is anyone’s guess, because her life plays like one of the up-from-nothing stories she seems to specialize in. There was a father somewhere, but he’s been long out of the picture. She was raised by her mother, a former community theater actress, and a godmother, and they all moved, she says, “about 18 times before I was 9.” Now there is a brand-new baby sister, but that father is gone. (“They were engaged, then broke up, then my mom found out she was pregnant.”)

Malone is deliriously happy, one of her dreams being to have a sibling. “I remember times helping my mother count our money to see if we could afford to go to Taco Bell,” says Malone of her precocious earlier days.

More fondly, she remembers watching her mom perform in musicals, sitting on pianos and wanting to do it too. Her mother, Debbie, 35, concedes: “I had a one-way ticket to New York at one time, but I didn’t have the guts to use it. I’m enjoying Jena’s success, but I’m not living through it,” she insists.

By second grade, then in Lake Tahoe, Malone had reached auteur status: “I starred in, directed and did the sets for ‘The Frog Prince Continued,’ ” she says. “I was never shy about performing.”

Almost three years ago, she told her mother she wanted to start going out for roles and won the first one, a student film. The word went out that here was a talent that had to be reckoned with.

“The longest I’ve stopped working since then is four months,” says Malone, who dabbled in commercials, series (an episode of “Chicago Hope”) and even a failed pilot (with the “My So-Called Life” people--the similarities to Claire Danes are obvious) before landing the breakthrough role in “Bastard,” which Anjelica Huston directed.

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For Hawn, directing Malone in “Hope” made her first time at the helm relatively easy duty. “Jena brought to this project her incredible innate wisdom and understanding. She’s so tuned in to the truth and is the perfect instrument for communicating it. I’d start to give her a direction and she’d just say, ‘I know.’ She feels like one of my appendages.”

Malone admits her own history lessons (she is tutored daily through a Los Angeles-based school program) had taken her only as far as the Civil War, but she relishes the lessons she gets with each new project, including this one.

Although some may think a young girl having to deal with issues like sexual abuse, homelessness and segregation is more than enough education, Malone takes it like someone for whom there are no surprises.

“I wanted to do ‘Bastard’ because a friend of mine had been abused, and so it was a story I wanted to tell,” she explains. “Everything I’ve done has had some kind of undertone, some sense of purpose, and I like that.”

She plans to be directing and writing by the time she’s, maybe, 15? “I’m already writing two scripts,” she says matter-of-factly. “One is about three girls, and it’s pretty rough. The other is about a girl who witnesses her mother getting killed.”

Obviously, no plans to lighten up.

She’s in New York shooting a film with Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts. This one deals with cancer, divorce and stepmothering, and Malone is the character in the middle of it all.

“Julia is so wonderful, so fun, and Susan is the best in the world,” gushes the young actress, who says she is soaking up everything in New York before settling down with her mother and new sister in Colorado.

Settling down sounds pretty good to her right now, as does returning to a regular school situation.

“My friends say, ‘Oh, school’s so boring,’ but when you’re away from it, you miss it,” she says. “My friends are mostly in L.A., and I don’t even think they’ve seen anything I’ve done. One came to visit me on the set of ‘Hope,’ and she said, ‘Wow! I didn’t know you worked so hard.’ ”

* “Hope” airs Sunday at 5, 7 and 9 p.m. and again Tuesday at 5 p.m. and Thursday at 8 p.m. on cable’s TNT. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).