Graduating to a High-Profile ‘Roswell’ Role

The first thing you notice about Shiri Appleby is the giggle. It’s constant. While some people punctuate their sentences with exclamation points, Appleby uses a giggle.

But don’t let that fool you. Appleby may have been born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, but she’s no Valley girl. In fact, she can be as mature as vintage wine and as serious as a right cross when the situation demands it.

Take her decision to attend high school, for example. On the cusp of a lucrative acting career, Appleby turned her back on Hollywood to enroll at Calabasas High School, trading the California dream for an after-school job at the California Pizza Kitchen.

“I probably missed a lot of opportunities, but those four years were really great and I made some really good friends,” she says. “Those are the kind of experiences that I would never trade. You can never go back and relive those.”

Fast forward two years. Appleby, a fresh-faced, energetic 20-year-old who still speaks enthusiastically about getting her first driver’s license, is sitting in another restaurant, ordering the food now instead of delivering it. Fortunately, hers turned out to be a case of fame delayed rather than fame denied because she returned to Hollywood shortly after graduation, eventually landing her first starring role in the new WB sci-fi series “Roswell,” which debuts Oct. 6.

And guess what her character is?

“A high school student,” Appleby says with a giggle. And to think, she just spent four years studying the part. Is this a great town or what?

But if the fact that Appleby got the part is serendipitous, the fact that she even got an audition is a case of beating the odds. Frustrated in her efforts to win a tryout through the normal channels, Appleby had given up on the show by the time a friend approached executive producer David Nutter with her photo and resume.

“I had never done that before,” she says sheepishly. “I’m very much, ‘If it’s not meant to be, it’s not going to happen.’ I just felt like I had cheated in a way.

“That was one of the first auditions that I didn’t really put that much pressure on myself because I just didn’t figure I would get it.”

Instead, Nutter was so enamored with Appleby he had her read repeatedly for all three of the show’s recurring female roles, finally casting her as Liz Parker, a student and part-time waitress in a sleepy New Mexico town who is brought back from the dead through the mysterious intervention of a classmate she later learns is an alien. An alien with a crush on her.

“She was something very, very special,” concedes Nutter. “It’s a situation where we really were able to find a diamond in the rough. It’s luck on our part.”

That feeling is mutual, insists Appleby, who put her studies at USC on hold to take the role.

“Going to work every day, that’s the best part for sure,” she says. “Every other week I get handed a script of work that I actually get to do instead of getting thrown into an audition room. I’m extremely excited about it, but I don’t want to allow things to blow out of proportion.”

Not that it’s easy to keep a level head, mind you. Two years ago, Appleby’s biggest responsibility was putting out the high school yearbook; this fall, she’ll have a network television series built around her. Heady stuff for a kid still unspoiled enough to call 16 years of Taco Bell and Cheerios commercials a learning experience.

“All this stuff is so very new. I feel like such an amateur,” she says. “I have worked before, but I’ve never been exposed to this aspect of it. It has been a lot of work and effort...but this is definitely the first part that has let me show more of my talent.”