Published in the August 2012 issue

Brooke Nipar

She's telling a story with a punchline, building up to something. But I stop her. It only seems right. Ashley Greene is about to make a joke about the setting of the movie Butter, an indie comedy she stars in with Jennifer Garner and Hugh Jackman, a film at least tangentially about competitive butter-carving, set in Iowa but filmed for some (visually unjustifiable) reason in Shreveport, Louisiana. She's leading up to an anywhere-but-here joke about the Midwest. Her teeth shine, her hair falls straight and true on the nape of her neck, her glance tilts a bit downward. She knows people in Los Angeles regularly pleasure themselves with dopey jokes about flyover states. It feels like she's about to let herself be just a little bit mean. And she wants to tell a story.

Brooke Nipar

I put up my hand to stop her. "Listen, I should be fair," I say. "Before you go any further: I live in the Midwest. I flew in from Indiana last night."

With that, Ashley Greene flops her long, fragile-looking hand over her mouth and gently barks out a laugh at herself. "Oh, my God," she says. "That's great." She tilts a finger, pointing to me then to her, back and forth, laughing at the look-what-I-almost-got-us-into thing. "Me, too," she says. "I'm from Florida!"

Brooke Nipar

What the? "No, no," I clarify. "I said Indiana. Green-castle. Twenty-five years."

"Well, I'm from Florida!" she declares. And, truth is, somehow the simple joyous force of this incongruous assertion makes us peas in a pod in that moment. She drops her anecdote, leans against the table, gets just a little closer, and I can smell her shampoo. She has her finger twirling the inside rail of her large hoop earring. She left Jacksonville when she was seventeen. A year later, she had a leading role in Twilight, traveling enough that she can now say pretty clearly "I don't really live here." Again with the finger, pointing this way and that, meaning: this place, this neighborhood, this city, Los Angeles. She touches the end of her hair, flicks the silky weight of it over her shoulder, and looks in like she's sharing a secret.

"Wait," I say, "What was the joke? Was it about butter carving?" But she begs off the punchline. The moment has passed. She's too smart to put her foot back in her mouth. "You make five movies with the same people and they really do feel like family. But film those same five movies in different locations, and none of the locations ever really feels like home." And just like that, Ashley Greene turns the whole thing on a dime, whips up a chicken salad of sentiment and connection from the chicken shit of the moment.

Brooke Nipar

Tick out Ashley Greene's name in some Internet image-search, and you're met with the marvelous puzzle of a woman who transforms herself from sultry accident — tripping happily along a red carpet, hair mussed, cleavage plunging, a party girl caught in a wide-open laugh at the absurdity of a lucky life — to slender, luminous sorority girl: hair brushed down, clipped in back, curling prim on her shoulders, a sensible and diligent student of the work she's undertaken. It would be unfair to say she does all this with her eyes and her hair. But sorry, that's how it works. She transforms with one or the other from photo to photo, right in front of your face.

She looks free enough, as if she has all the time she needs. She's utterly without tension in considering herself, speaks about her life as if it were a wander, as if there were little real effort in the path she's beaten from Twilight, the vampire-hormone megapack, to The Apparition, a late-summer horror film, to Butter. There's no real hint of the work schedule that keeps her from having any real home.

She does blush, though — at the mention of naked body-painted photo shoots at the beach, and when called out on never claiming a boyfriend. Even when her eyes are quietly admired, blood spreads from her chest to her neck and cheeks. The party-girl Ashley Greene, the one who can wear any dress, anytime, and make it look like it's about to fall off, is not without illusion. Ashley Greene does not drink, doesn't really party. "In my second year in Los Angeles, when I was eighteen, I wasn't getting any bookings," she says, "so I stopped going out, stopped partying. It was a matter of getting to the work. I had to focus."

Nor is the petite sorority-girl Ashley Greene, who sits before me today, the least bit icy; she's just a girl with a Day-Timer pinched on the seat between her thigh and purse, a vessel of responsibility. In fact, she's so relaxed, so cat-stretched against the promise of two hours of conversation and a bowl of soup that you'd think she might have settled into a comfort zone about work. But in fact: "What Twilight gave me was years to consider how I wanted to work otherwise."

Brooke Nipar

She twists at the earring once more. Next year, she'll turn twenty-six. She mimes an understated fist-pump when this comes up. Laughing then at herself, she says she looks forward to being thirty. "It's a good age," she says. "It's an age of choices." Here she is, then, the profound naïf making such a careful-what-you-wish-for declaration that I can't help but roll my eyes.

"I know," she says, "don't rush it, right?" I shrug. She smiles, eyes a little wet and dark. Then, without seeming to consider it, she pulls out her hair clip, runs her hand through that hair, and shakes her mane, so it seems to gain volume. There she is then: mussed up and still full of intention.

"Really, finish that Butter story," I say. "I interrupted you. Tell me the one about Iowa. Make it about Indiana. I can take it." She laughs and a blush climbs from her chest upward along her neck to her cheeks and eyes, all the way into her hair. Good people, good people. Ashley Greene looks me dead in the eye when she asserts this. We get no nearer to the punchline, if there ever was one.

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