She’s developing some insecurities

Tea LEONI hijacked lunch. The actress stopped her car in front of Allegria restaurant in Malibu, plucked her designated lunch date out of a booth, cleared off the passenger seat by throwing a pile of family detritus into the back of her car, and took off. It was a few days before Halloween.

On the way up PCH, Leoni explained to her guest that she’d come home from a night shoot a few hours earlier, awakened to find she was about due at her daughter’s elementary school Halloween parade, had all of four minutes to assemble and don her costume, and then remembered that a lunch interview had been scheduled at the same time. So, decked out in the sort of cowboy outfit you might see in the musical “Oklahoma” -- neckerchief, embroidered denim shirt, jeans, cowboy hat and boots -- she had no choice but to combine events without warning.

Her patrician, blue-eyed beauty undimmed by the lack of sleep or styling, Leoni was interrupted in her running explanation as another driver tried to skip his turn at a four-way stop. “I’m going, buddy, I’ve got a parade, back off, Jack!” Leoni joked.

She parked at the school and raced up to the parade grounds, guest in tow. Classes of brightly costumed children circled the field as parents applauded. Leoni spotted her 5-year-old daughter, West, a.k.a. Sleeping Beauty, in the crowd. They waved to each other eagerly, and after West’s run around the ring, her mother scooped her up in a hug and covered her with kisses. Plans were made for an after-school play date, and then it was back to the car.

On the road again, Leoni asked, “What are we doing here? Oh, right, ‘Spanglish.’ ”

WHEN CULTURES COLLIDE

A comedy-drama by writer-director James L. Brooks, due out from Columbia on Dec. 17, “Spanglish” stars Leoni and Adam Sandler as the heads of a troubled family. They hire a housekeeper (Paz Vega) who becomes deeply involved with their lives. Leoni hasn’t seen it -- nobody has -- and though she usually doesn’t like to watch her work, she wants to see this one.

The first reason: “so that I don’t put an enormous foot in my mouth during the press junket and feel like a complete ...” The first noun she used was unprintable, so Leoni offered alternatives. “Let’s do ‘jerk,’ in quotes -- let’s do ‘fool’ -- ‘jackass,’ we can do ‘jackass!’ ” When told “jackass” might be unusable, she expressed disbelief. “You can’t do ‘jackass’? It’s a mule. OK, just say ‘mule.’ ” There you have it. Tea Leoni doesn’t want to feel like a mule at the junket.

“I also want to see it because Adam gives an amazing performance here,” she adds, back at the restaurant. After praising his work, she moved on to Vega, whom she calls “phenomenal. This is a woman who is going to take this town by storm if she wants.” Another reason to see it? Cloris Leachman, who plays her mother. “She’s such a hot ticket,” says Leoni, who found working with her consistently exciting. Plus, “she’s 78, she looks like she’s 65, and she has a [rear end] that is more taut than David’s.” (The David in question is Duchovny, Leoni’s husband.)

For all the enjoyment she got from working with her costars, Leoni had a surprisingly hard time on the shoot. “It was the most exhausting journey in my career, hands down,” said Leoni, 38. She played Deborah, a woman who lost her job and goes through an identity crisis, hurting everyone she loves in the process.

“Deborah is almost really smart, she’s almost got a sense of humor, she’s almost accessible, she’s almost right, she’s almost appropriate, but she’s not. And so in a way I found myself, for close to a year, playing this person who could not be understood by anybody in her life.” As a result, Leoni found her time on the set lonely and isolating. Her kids (son Miller is 2) came to the set only a couple of times because she didn’t want them around her as Deborah.

Leoni has played a lot of neurotic women to great comic effect, perhaps most notably in the 1996 film “Flirting With Disaster.” She finds those roles a lot of fun, because “I can transfer my own neurotic tendencies into their neurotic tendencies.” She calls it a great, legally artistic transference. “It can be very liberating because now the neurosis isn’t yours anymore, and it gets its yayas out on someone else’s time.” But this time, the reverse seemed to occur -- Leoni found that the character’s negative energy was being thrown onto her, like a heap of dirty laundry. As a result, “I really lost my confidence, and I felt like the character was out of control.”

Leoni saw that she would have to take more of a risk than with any previous role. “This was really about how scary was I going to let it be for me, and work in an unknown place and embrace Jim Brooks’ process, which is for all intents and purposes stressful and maddening and genius and exhausting and enlightening.”

She credits Duchovny for giving her the love and understanding she needed to manage that process. “He’s very much a reason why I got through it, and I think got through it with bells on, where I was able to walk away and say, ‘This was a great, growing experience for me, I learned a lot, and I’m proud of what is out there.’ I haven’t even seen it, and I know I’m proud of it, because I went someplace that I haven’t been before.”

Then, lunch over, Leoni went back to someplace she hadn’t been nearly enough lately -- bed.