LOS ANGELES

A CLONE army of starlets marches through Hollywood casting offices every day — all beautiful, all talented, all interchangeable. Pick one, any one. But every so often a young actress rolls into town and drops jaws. Keep your eye on that one, studio executives say. That one is different.

Olivia Wilde, 27, is one of those women.

The green-eyed bombshell arrived in the movie capital in 2002, strangely enough, to work in a casting agency, your basic head-shot processing plant. Her parents, two prominent Washington journalists with all sorts of Beltway and celebrity connections, helped arrange it. The goal, according to her mother, Leslie Cockburn, a producer for “60 Minutes,” was to squelch Ms. Wilde’s interest in acting by exposing her to a particularly hardhearted corner of the dream factory, where hundreds of résumés are casually tossed aside.

“They thought I would take one look at the cattiness and people from Yale and Juilliard begging for jobs and hightail it out of town,” Ms. Wilde said recently over lunch at a tucked-away little cafe on Sunset Boulevard.

But Ms. Wilde was almost immediately cast herself, popping up in shows like “The OC” on Fox and landing a continuing supporting role on that network’s hit series “House” as a self-destructive doctor. Her first big movie part, a Joan of Arc-like cyber warrior, came last year in “Tron: Legacy.” Now she has seven films in stages of completion, starting with “Cowboys & Aliens,” an atypical action extravaganza that arrives on Friday from Universal Pictures, and continuing one week later with Universal’s ultra-crude comedy “The Change-Up.”