BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – Is Olivia Munn the thinking man’s sex symbol? Sure, why not?

For the last six years, Munn, whose film and TV credits include Magic Mike, The Daily Show and currently HBO’s The Newsroom, has regularly made “the 100 sexiest” or “Hot 100” women’s lists of men’s magazines like FHM and Maxim.

And the 33-year-old co-star of the new demon fighting movie, Deliver Us from Evil, in theatres Wednesday, says if she can represent beauty beyond society’s traditional norms, then she’s all for it.

“I’m half-Asian, half-white, I have freckles, and dark hair and I’m barely five-four and I’ve got a little bit more curves,” Munn explained in an interview with QMI Agency.

“I grew up in a world where I saw blonde-haired, blue-eyed, stick thin was the ideal for beauty. And I remember looking in the mirror at eight, nine years old and just hating the way I looked. Hating that I had Asian eyes, hating that I had freckles, because you didn’t get confirmation from the rest of the world... If (those polls are) helping to push open what the standard of beauty is, then that’s always a nice thing.”

Munn, who is Chinese-German-Irish and from an Air Force family that spent time in Utah, Colorado and mostly Japan, was raised Christian but had let her faith fall away as an adult.

But then she made Deliver Us from Evil, in which she plays Jen, the wife of NYPD sergeant-turned-demon fighter Ralph Sarchie (Eric Bana).

Their characters are based on a real-life couple, who are now divorced, but Munn got to email with Jen and, unfortunately, for her, the actress watched five minutes of a tape of a real-life exorcism provided by Sarchie and didn’t sleep for a week afterwards.

“I heard Eric say he couldn’t sleep for three weeks (afterwards),” Munn told reporters. “So instantly I said, ‘Oh, I have to watch this now’... And he went, ‘No’... So I finished the film and the day I finished shooting I went home, and I’d been waiting, it was like my treat. And the crazy parts in the movie are what you see in this footage. The way that Eric explained it to me is, he said, ‘This guy. He is in a straitjacket. And he’s got this otherworldly look in his eyes’... And he’s sitting there and he’s shaking and out of nowhere his forehead splits open... And he starts to drool and then when the drool comes out of his mouth and it hits the straitjacket it turns into blood... And then I turned it off. I was like, ‘I’m done. I’m done.’ And after that, that opened me up to believing again.”

That same week, Munn met and became friends with Teresa Caputo, star of Long Island Medium, who did an impromptu reading of the actress.

“She knew things that no one in the world knew. It was impossible that she would know, and then after that, I was a complete believer.”

Following shooting the third and final season of The Newsroom, on which she plays financial reporter Sloan Sabbith, Munn’s future includes the release of the art heist “broad comedy” Mortdecai with Johnny Depp, Ewan McGregor and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Saying goodbye to The Newsroom, created and written by Aaron Sorkin, isn’t as hard as you might think.

“I’m excited,” Munn told QMI Agency. “Sorkin, this is his show, and this is how he wants to tell the story in three seasons. Other shows, where they just keep going past the time where the creator wants to tell them, it’s really great we get to stop when Sorkin’s done. The show has done everything for me in my career. Being on The Daily Show was my first big break and I owe everything to Jon Stewart for believing in me and then Aaron Sorkin saw me on The Daily Show and gave me that opportunity (on The Newsroom)... Whenever I go to somebody for advice, I go to (Sorkin) and I go to Jon Stewart.”

Munn says the biggest surprise about having a successful career is never getting to think you’ve actually made it.

“You get to a place in your life where you think, ‘If I could just make it to here. That would be awesome. That would be great,’” she told reporters. “And then when you get there you look up and realize that you’re at the bottom of a very tall mountain.”

Deliver Us From Evil opens Wednesday, July 2.

Twitter: @JaneCStevenson

jane.stevenson@sunmedia.ca