Kat Dennings is hammering home that she’s a weirdo the way other actresses cake on their down-to-earthness and frequently indulged desire for In-N-Out burgers. "I don’t think I’m a weirdo in a bad way, there’s just a lot going on in my head," she says. To be fair, she’s fielding a question as to why she’s called herself "weird" in just about every medium available—there was her recent tweet ("People are weird. Boys are weird. Men are weird. Love is weird. You are weird. I am weird. Life is weird. Weird is weird. Look, a MINOTAUR!"), multiple posts on her blog proclaiming her oddball status ("As you are undoubtedly aware from reading this endless omnibus of redonkulousness, I am kind of a weirdo" and then, just minutes into in our phone conversation, she labels herself "a weird one" yet again. Now she’s talking like she almost has it: "Maybe it’s a movie thing? I want to see as many movies as I can and I covet a lot of weird influential movies. I have a lot of favorite authors...Douglas Adams and Charlotte Bronte and Richard Brautigan. I get obsessed. That could be it—how I get obsessed with things. Though I think if I could put my finger on my exact weirdness I’d be able to change it."

Change it? That would be a mistake. The 25-year-old star of CBS’s uncharacteristically lascivious 2 Broke Girls is swooned over for her deadpanning anti-ingénue persona as much as her anime sextoon proportions. Dennings was a natural fit to play Broke Girl Max, a tough, quick-with-the-quip diner waitress who charms with brassy lines like "Hey, when you get a second, stop looking at my boobs." (True to form, Dennings sees Max as "a cross between Danny Zuko and Cartman.") Michael Patrick King, the show’s co-creator and more famously the man behind _Sex and the City’_s epic run, pretty much molded the character specifically for Dennings. "I don’t think there’s anybody else like her so we basically hunted her down for this," King says. "She has a kind of amazing outsider edge. It made everything else fall into place."

Actually it wouldn’t seem illogical to assume that Dennings’s biggest roles—the wisecracking, indie-rock-loving teenage outsider in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist; the caustic maneater with many a piercing in The House Bunny—were custom made for her, too. Dennings genuinely seems to be the brashly cool, funny girl she’s constantly cast to play, the type of girl for whom the term "girl crush" was invented. Just don’t call her quirky. "I hate that damn word!" Dennings shouts. "Quirky is what a guy would call a girl he doesn’t understand." Noted. We’ll stick to weird.