A character so nice she plays her twice

With her leading roles, so to speak, in “Melinda and Melinda,” Radha Mitchell has joined a select sorority that includes Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, Judy Davis and Mira Sorvino -- actresses chosen by Woody Allen to bring his complex and funny female characters to life.

Mitchell had never met the Oscar-winning auteur when he called to ask if she would play Melinda, the woman around whom he’d woven an intricate, twice-told tale. Startled, the Australian actress thought the call was a prank.

“But it wasn’t a joke,” recalls the lithe Mitchell, nursing a tea at Shutters in Santa Monica on a recent rainy afternoon. “He said, ‘You have an hour to read the script.’ And they sent it over. And then there was somebody who came to pick it up.”

Though Allen rarely allows any of his actors to read an entire script, Mitchell, 31, received the complete screenplay because of the magnitude of her part. “Most of the other actors didn’t know who was who or what was what in the scene, or what they represented in the story or anything.”

Once she’d agreed to take the role, Mitchell says, Allen didn’t change the script to fit her. “The script was very similar to what you see,” she says. “Obviously it is an intellectual exercise, and you wondered how it was going to translate. Woody told me he edited it in two weeks, which is really fast, so obviously he had it very clear in his mind.”

Allen, she says, had seen her in “Ten Tiny Love Stories,” an intimate 2001 indie drama that features actresses speaking to the camera about love. Though it saw limited theatrical release overseas, “Love Stories” made its debut in the U.S. on video.

“My story was running into an ex-boyfriend at the cinema and knowing that you are going to go back home with somebody else that night, and the memory it triggers,” she says. “The guy had a hairy back and hairy hands. It was a funny little anecdote.”

Though Mitchell talked to Allen by phone before production began, she didn’t meet him until the day before cameras began to roll. “It was a unique experience,” she says with a smile. “And I played the two characters on the first day. In the morning I was one Melinda, and in the afternoon I was another Melinda, so by the evening I was just freaking out!”

Marc Forster, who directed Mitchell in 2000’s “Everything Put Together” and in the hit “Finding Neverland,” in which she played the unhappy wife of playwright James Barrie, says directors gravitate toward the actress for a number of reasons.

“She has an incredible power of saying things without saying them with words,” says Forster. “It is a pure emotional communication. She has that skill really down -- that she can communicate with an audience without using any words, and you know exactly how she feels and what she feels.

“It is amazing, the radiance she has. So many actresses can be beautiful, but they can’t capture your attention. She really has this power, not only from her body language and looks but also from her soul and mind.”

The conceit of “Melinda and Melinda,” which opened in Los Angeles on Wednesday, is that two playwrights -- one (Wallace Shawn) who pens comedies and the other (Larry Pine) who specializes in dramas -- meet over dinner one night and tell the same story, filtered through their iconoclastic views of life, about a woman named Melinda.

In the dramatic version of Melinda’s story, she’s a frazzled, suicidal divorcee who causes havoc in the life of a former school friend (Chloe Sevigny) and her struggling actor husband (Jonny Lee Miller).

In the comedic tale, the sweetly scattered Melinda changes the lives of an Allenesque actor (Will Ferrell) and his successful documentary-filmmaker wife (Amanda Peet).

Though most actors say that drama is easy and comedy is hard, Mitchell found the opposite to be true because the dramatic side of the film verges on melodrama.

“I think the dramatic side was an interesting time,” she muses. “My initial idea is that she should be less realistic, but he was all about making her real. ‘Make it real; if anyone laughs we are ruined,’ ” she recalls Allen saying.

But audiences have found a lot of the dramatic view of Melinda’s life absurdly comic. “Obviously it has a cynical, twisted sense of humor,” Mitchell explains. “The film is about attitude and the effects of attitude on your life.”

Allen was initially distant, she says, but warmed up to the cast during the filming. “He was different as the movie progressed,” she says. “At first he didn’t talk very much, and by the end, we had a dialogue and we would discuss what we were doing.”

And though working with Allen was “intimidating,” Mitchell adds that she learned to put more trust in her instincts as an actress.

Mitchell reports that the casts of both stories met for lunch before production began in New York. “We started at some cafe uptown and we progressed [downtown], so at 3 in the morning we were in Alphabet City getting drunk. That’s how we got to know each other!”