She’s a Future Star, Honest

TV star Amanda Bynes can giggle at the memory of sitting for an interview when she was 12--although she didn’t exactly sit.

“I was so energetic,” she admits, recalling the evening she spent mostly bounding around her backyard, dashing around the pool, shrieking at an oversized spider hanging in the garden and spinning under the stars in her denim playsuit, singing her own little song about beautiful gowns and diamonds. “Oh, it was like, calm down, child.”

Now almost 16, Amanda has indeed calmed down. Nickelodeon’s exuberant, funny-faced little comedy star has grown into a self-assured young person who’s quite warm and hospitable around the house--although maybe she’ll gush a little over pictures of brother Tom and new sister-in-law Melissa’s wedding. And as for her future, well, she’ll be getting her driver’s license soon, so she’s pretty excited about that.

The funny thing is that a lot of other people are excited about her future, too--for a much different reason. Her first feature film, “Big Fat Liar,” opens Friday and, although it stars Frankie Muniz (“My Dog Skip” and TV’s “Malcolm in the Middle”) and Paul Giamatti (“Saving Private Ryan” and “Man on the Moon”), it’s the newcomer who has show business professionals dropping phrases like “a young Cameron Diaz or Goldie Hawn.” Amanda has already signed a pilot deal to star in a situation comedy on the WB network and studio executives are poring over scripts for her all-but-certain big-screen projects to come.

“The sky’s the limit for her. The world is her oyster,” said Jordan Levin, the WB entertainment president who’s developing the untitled sitcom about a teenager living in Manhattan with her older sister. “Amanda’s funny, talented, poised. And she’s cute.”

And he’s hardly alone in his enthusiasm. Her movie colleagues predict audiences will love her because she hurls every ounce she has into her role and, as Giamatti says, she has a remarkable knack for timing her delivery for laughs.

“I’d never worked with kids before, but I have to say she’s very good,” Giamatti said. “She brought a high level of improvisational comedy to her performance.” How good is she? “Liar” director Shawn Levy suggests moviegoers closely watch the scene at the beginning of Act 2 in which Frankie and Amanda’s characters first encounter the producer’s receptionist.

“Amanda doesn’t have a line, but the whole scene is constructed around her reaction shots,” he said. “She is so alive on screen and so effervescent as a presence, it’s a gift to a director to have that to work with.” Levy adds bluntly: “Within two years she’s going to be carrying movies left and right. There is no comedian anywhere near that age range like Amanda Bynes. She is an absolute original.”

It’s a funny thing, too, that almost any kid in America who watches TV could have told him that long ago, because kids have watched Amanda grow up as she’s tickled them by the millions.

In fact, she’s been honing her craft before live audiences for most of her life. Her father, Rick--as a longtime fan of stand-up comedy, he helped Amanda write jokes for her act at the Laugh Factory--nurtured the future star. “When she was 4, I used to say I wish that Spielberg could come over and watch her,” he said. Since that seemed unlikely, he shepherded Amanda and older sister Jillian to community theater. When Jillian had a starring turn in “Wait Until Dark,” Amanda was too young to perform, so she sat in the audience reciting her sister’s lines.

Amanda was 7 when she broke into show business as a spunky orphan in “Annie” at the Camarillo Youth Center. With mom Lynn shuttling her from school to rehearsal, she never stopped. Stage roles followed, and her first raves appeared when a reviewer for this newspaper called her “sensational” as Scout in “To Kill a Mockingbird” (at the Arts Council Center in Thousand Oaks) and “even more impressive” in the lead as Mary in “The Secret Garden” (at the Conejo Players Theater).

When she was 9, Rick enrolled her in a stand-up comedy class in Hollywood. On graduation night at the Laugh Factory, she was spotted by former child actors Dan Schneider and Brian Robbins (“Head of the Class”), who were scouting talent for Nickelodeon.

Amanda was 10 when she debuted on “All That,” Nick’s sketch-comedy series where she refined her physical comedy chops--again before live audiences. Her tour de force was “Ask Ashley,” about a sweet advice columnist who worked herself into a rage over invariably inane requests for advice.

On the contest series “Figure It Out,” she gamely splashed around in coatings of the show’s signature green slime. Now Nick is running the third season of “The Amanda Show,” in which she gives herself over to wacky teen characters like the classroom mob moll Candy Tulips--pleasing kids and, no doubt, many an older brother, too. And therein lies her promise.

“I’d love to see her have a career like Goldie Hawn,” said Schneider, “Liar” screenwriter and a creative force driving a lot of Nick’s comedy programming. “Goldie has that rare ability to be cute, sweet, vulnerable, real, and make you really feel something special about a character.”

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Schneider and others who work with her say that Amanda’s on-camera warmth is a glow from her solid upbringing in a close-knit family. She lives with her parents and her dogs Tootsie and Betty in a roomy suburban ranch house north of Los Angeles. Jillian is away at college, but her grandmother, Anne Organ, lives next door. Her home life comes first. Homework is priority No. 1. Dad keeps a close eye on her moviegoing, steering her away from R-rated fare, “and even hard PG-13s; they’re the same as Rs,” Rick Bynes said.

He’s there to help her shrug off bad press--as when a supermarket tabloid last year reported leeringly that Amanda and Frankie were dating up a storm--when they were 14. Their chemistry on screen in “BFL” is certainly reminiscent of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney’s, and they’ve been appearing together socially, but Amanda insists they’re just buddies. “When my friends who work in the business come over, they say, ‘You live in another world, it’s like so far away,’” she said. “But a big part of who I am is that I still am a normal kid in the same place where I was born.” So, in many ways, she’s as normal as her fans.

A straight-A 10th-grader (English is her favorite subject), she loves to shop, watch a little TV--she likes “Friends,” “Felicity” and “The Gilmore Girls.” She chats with pals online or on the phone. Of course, she has a career to manage too.

So one evening recently she was relaxing at home, curled up on the sofa, reading “Memoirs of a Geisha”--a novel Steven Spielberg has for a long time wanted to turn into a movie, she pointed out--about Chiyo, a pretty little girl who grows up to become the beautiful Sayuri, who’s enslaved by the passions of wealthy men.

Amanda was still a bit hoarse after her first-ever press junket promoting the movie--which meant sitting for nearly 100 interviews.

“I had to say, ‘Stop. My voice is gone,’” she said, pulling her sleeves down over her fists and cuddling them under her chin. “I had to go drink some tea.”

In her cozy living room far from the bright lights, Amanda comes across as serious about life, insightful about her work, philosophical about her world to come.

She dreams about college--going to UC Berkeley, maybe, studying business--but she realizes she may need to stay in Southern California near work. She dreams about getting married and having children. “I want to have the freedom to not work if I don’t want to,” she said. “To be with my kids if I want to.” She evinces sharp instincts, deftly deconstructing the latest teen movies--without identifying a role that she would have liked to play.

“I see careers that I like, like Kirsten Dunst’s, for instance,” she said. “She did ‘Bring It On,’ which was all cute and fun, and then she did ‘Crazy/Beautiful,’ which showed a lot of truths about teenagers that have angst and sadness and trouble. So she isn’t afraid of trying different things, becoming different people.”

Amid all the glowing praise, Bynes has had her share of career disappointments. While “The Amanda Show” pilot took off, another one she shot about a washed-up child star who has to go home to her small town and be a normal kid again didn’t get picked up.

“It didn’t work,” she shrugged. “I saw it.” So she remains realistic about the process. “I try not to get too excited until something actually happens,” she said, looking forward to her upcoming pilot at the WB. (The WB is part-owned by Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times.)

“I just figure if it happens, then that’s wonderful and if not, then I just stay in school longer and wait for the next thing.” And she’s philosophical, too, when people ask why the child star didn’t make any movies when she was still a child.

“I’m the type of person who believes that everything happens for a reason, and at the time that it’s supposed to,” she said. “So now ... other ideas are coming up for other movies and everything is just happening really wonderfully.”

A few days later, Amanda reflected on “Geisha.” The little girl in the book grew up and, in a fashion, lived happily ever after. She was crying when she read the closing lines, she said.

“The message is wonderful,” she said. “[Sayuri] ended up living her life the way she wanted to. It ended up being really nice for her, in her situation and her circumstances. It was a really wonderful, a moving story.”