NATASHA LYONNE / ACTOR

Natasha Lyonne’s supposed to be studying at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, but she’s too busy with a film career to start classes. She stars in Tamara Jenkins’ “Slums of Beverly Hills” as a teen whose developing breasts become a major plot point. Lyonne, 19, started at 6 as regular Opal in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” and was Woody Allen’s daughter in “Everyone Says I Love You.” She’s now filming “Great Falls.”

FIGURING IT OUT: “My breasts are my press. I guess it goes to show that even a flat girl in Hollywood can come out with her chest forward. Stereotypes will never be broken. Hollywood came through for me and gave me prosthetics.”

CAREER MOVES: “Isn’t that the way to potentially just stunt your ultimate career path, by making your career of ‘Scream’ sequels and knock-offs? But maybe my agent is lying to me and I’m just not getting those parts. ‘Slums of Beverly Hills’ is a character and performance piece. It’s much better for you.”

LET’S BE REAL: “I think I’d have to hold on to those prosthetics if I want to be in one of those sequels. That’s the sad news.”

AGE-ISM: “The scripts I read are really young-girl-driven stories, which is interesting that there are any available. That’s an exciting trend--ones that aren’t horror movies.”

BICOASTAL: “In New York, you watch TV--Jerry Springer’s on and you laugh, and a commercial is just a commercial. You’re just watching television. Out here it’s like, ‘I would have been a great Glad Bag girl. Why didn’t I get sent out for that?’ But simultaneously, in New York it’s like, ‘I’m not getting sent any scripts! There’s all this stuff I don’t know about.’ ”

UNEXPLOITED: “Doris Wishman, the first female exploitation filmmaker--’Nude on the Moon,’ ‘Bad Girls Go to Hell’--we’re trying to make a movie together. My mom moved to Miami a couple years ago and I met her there, and since, we’ve tried to make a movie. Soon as I make some real money I’d love to put it in that. She’s such a genius that hasn’t been maximized.”

GROWTH EXPERIENCE: “John Cassavetes said that acting should be a search of self-discovery, not just of discovering your character. This movie did that for me so strongly, and I didn’t even recognize it until after. I grew up from it, and Tamara taught me a lot, as did Alan and Marisa and [co-stars] David Krumholtz and Kevin Corrigan.”

EATING WORDS: “I thought I was a tough New Yorker, but how did I portray such an innocent? I saw something I said in the press, said I had no naivete left. That was really retarded for someone at any age, especially 19.”