For an actress currently enjoying the glare of burgeoning stardom, Olivia Thirlby is awfully laid back. “It’s really not that bad,” comments the young woman with a smile as we sit down to chat at the downtown Seattle W Hotel, “It’s a really low key day. I’m digging it.”

Olivia Thirlby in Sony Pictures Classics' The Wackness

We’re here to talk about her new movie The Wackness where she plays the newly graduated stepdaughter of a New York shrink (the great Ben Kingsley) who trades his services for marijuana with one of her fellow students, Luke (beguiling relative newcomer Josh Peck), with whom she’s just so happened to have started a relationship with. It’s pretty standard coming of age stuff, but the actress brings such a live-wire intensity and kinetic magnetism to her role she pretty much steals every scene she’s in.

In case you didn’t notice (and considering the substantial box office and four Oscar noms, I’m guessing most did), Thirlby first garnered recognition portraying Ellen Page’s best friend in the hit comedy Juno. She followed that up this year with a co-starring role in David Gordon Green’s magnificent Snow Angels, and for those curious souls out there needing to know everything before both those films she made her debut in director Paul Greengrass’ spectacular docudrama United 93. In short, she’s had a great run, and a person can’t help but wonder if all this success has gone to actress’ head.

“I think that Indie films are just becoming more interesting to people,” she responds without hesitation. “It seems like, at least from the outside, that [Hollywood] studios keep remaking the exact same thing over and over again and it’s kind of boring. Frankly, it’s like their following their own tired recipe.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I love action movie and I love superheroes but there is no superhero movie they haven’t made – they’re none left! It’s kind of crazy. I mean, sure, a lot of them are great movies but can’t we just do something else?”

That ‘something else’ has been the woman’s career up to this point. None of her films follow easy conventions, all take risks in one or another and each one features costars and/or filmmakers most actors can only dream of working with. Directors like Kenneth Lonergan, Jason Rietman, Greengrass, and Green, costars like Kingsley, Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, Allison Janney, J.K. Simmons, Jason Bateman, Jennifer Garner, Barbara Hershey, Molly Shannon, Jean Reno, Anna Paquin, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick and Matt Damon, the list seemingly getting more and more incredible with every project Thirlby gets cast in.

“It’s what I’m drawn to,” she says matter-of-factly. “Maybe that’s because [this] material is so unique and unusual and interesting and well-written; all of that stuff. I think it is just a combination of all those really great qualities and I’m drawn to those projects, and sometimes I’m even lucky enough to get cast in them. It’s really amazing, though, I have to admit. I definitely feel blessed by the majority of the [films] I’ve been able to work on so far.”

And it was a combination of all those things that brought her to writer/director Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness. “The script was just incredible,” she states, cutting off my question before I even have the chance to finish it. “It was such a New York story but it was so original with characters who were nothing like anything I had ever read before. It was kind of a classic coming of age story in so many ways but it had so many unusual and unique things about it. [The film] is so music-centric, so New York-centric, I guess, kind of, marijuana-centric, in a way, that it just spoke to me. It was really special. I knew in my heart I was perfect to play my character Stephanie immediately.”

All of which meant she would have to pursue the role vigorously. Not at that point yet where filmmakers immediately think of her when casting their projects, the youngster knew she was going to have to fight for the part if it was something she really wanted to be a part of. But where so many actors tend to claim to hate the auditioning process, Thirlby looked at competing for the role as a challenge she was more than ready to rise to.

“It’s the most exciting part for an artist,” she admits twirling a smile of rapture around her lips as if it were bubblegum. “The chase. The pursuit of the perfect part. When something kind of tickles you a little bit, lights you up inside, the thought of winning that role is so exciting that, even just the chance to audition is kind of the best part of the job. The auditioning, the finding of the roles that ignite you, that’s the [best] part as far as I’m concerned.”

In the case of this film, even though I can already guess at the answer I can’t help but ask if the effort pursuing the role was worth it, if the filming of the project met the expectations she read it on the page. “Most definitely,” Thirlby states without hesitation. “It was crazy. The thing about starting a movie is that one day you’re not working and the next day you are, and everything you do from that point forward is being captured on film so you’re making some sort of indelible mark. What you’re doing is possibly going to be judged for all time, so it’s pretty surreal.”

Josh Peck and Thirlby in Sony Pictures Classics' The Wackness

“I remember, our first day of filming we were [shooting] on the Upper East Side and it was this incredibly sunny day and it was beautiful, and the first scene we filmed was when Luke and Stephanie meet on the street and he offers to take her around on his deliveries. I remember wishing we could just stop and think about all this for a second because it’s such a crazy feeling to suddenly be thrown into it and feeling almost like you can’t be paying enough attention to what it is you’re doing. It’s now happening. You’re doing it, and the camera is rolling and you’re saying the lines, it’s all fairly surreal. Great, but surreal.”

As the movie takes place during the summer of 1994, I talk to the actress what she remembers about that time in her life and if she brought any of those memories to the set with her. “I was eight years old in 1994,” she giggles. “But, seriously, it is kind of weird. It was a hilarious coincidence, but when I went in for my costume fitting the wardrobe supervisor has a couple of High School yearbooks from 1994, and I’m looking through one of them and I’m like, wait a second, this is my school yearbook. So I started flipping through it and, sure enough, there’s me in second grade. It was the craziest coincidence ever.”

“But it also made it all so relatable, too, because the school was so small I recognized the faces of the seniors in the yearbook. The fashion was all so nondescript in that sort of laidback 1990’s way, and yet I knew who these people were and I could remember and channel that. It was a hysterical coincidence but it was also kind of a godsend because it really put me in the right frame of mind to play the part. It didn’t really feel that foreign to me.”

The film requires an amazing amount of intimacy on Thirlby’s part with her costar Peck. These are two people looking for different things, both learning things from the other neither probably expects or anticipates. Achieving this requires trust on the parts of the actors and acceptance that neither one of them is going to let down the other when all the naked dramatics really start heating up.

Thirlby and Peck in Sony Pictures Classics' The Wackness

“Josh is actually kind of like his character,” says the performer. “He’s a little guarded, quiet, intense, but he also has this side that can totally cut loose and be whacky. We got along great instantly. Josh played Luke pretty much as himself and I played Stephanie pretty much as myself and so what you see in the movie is really just Josh and Olivia getting along.”

“It was incredibly refreshing. Luke and Stephanie, I think, have a special repartee which is that they kind of fuck with each other. In that first scene where they’re like in the bathroom at the party, it’s like one-upmanship. So from the very beginning, from the very first moment we met, we started kind of doing Luke and Stephanie with each other. It was so subtle I would sometimes forget and we’d be talking between takes and he’d start saying something and it was like, oh my God he’s doing Luke. And then sometimes I would start just talking like Stephanie. And then we’d both be doing it and we’d just start messing with each other in that sense.”

“Josh and Olivia almost have that same relationship now, in a sense, I guess you could say, in our own off-camera friendship, and I think that closeness and ease we created between one another really translates well inside the movie.”

Flipping the switch a bit, I turn the attention towards the actress’ other major costar, Academy Award-winner Ben Kingsley. “He’s just incredible, isn’t he?” Thirlby asks exuberantly, her whole demeanor just radiating affection for her fellow actor. I immediately agree, ultimately asking her where working with him ranks inside her career.

“He’s up there. I’d maybe say he was second to working with Lauren Bacall, but that’s like trading one incredible fantastic giant for another so I don’t know if you could actually rank them like that. But, at the time, it was almost hard to wrap my mind around it. I mean, it’s just amazing to watch him work. He can arguably become a character better than any other actor around. And he does it with the words, which I find so fascinating. He would have the script supervisor tell him every time he said a single word wrong, if he said ‘that’ instead of ‘this’ she would come up and whisper it in his ear between takes. So what he does, which I find so fascinating, is he finds a character through what they say and he reads so deeply into it that the words become so important and specific that the define the character.”

Ben Kingsley in Sony Pictures Classics' The Wackness

“It was just amazing to me because that requires just the most extreme diligence and concentration, and I’m more the type of actor who flies by the seat of their pants and makes up things as she goes along. So, it was so incredible to watch somebody who is working on his level. He’s just so good acting with him can’t help but elevate you.”

With time running out, I decide I can’t let Thirlby go without getting her thoughts on the phenomenon Juno ended up becoming, the fact of which still strikes the woman as more than a little bit insane. “It’s so odd,” she says with a half chuckle. “It still is odd, actually. It was surprising. I mean, I saw a lot of the movie in the editing room before it came out and it was incredible, hilarious, wonderful and all the other things that it is, but the fact it kind of spoke to so many different kinds of audiences so deeply is kind of what was the most surprising and impressive about it. I don’t think we realized that it was going to appeal to so many demographics of people.”

“In another way, it was hard to see it get so big because then there was the inevitable backlash and it was hard to see or hear people hating on something that you feel so positive about. But, you know, that’s also a huge part of this job and something we can definitely all handle [and] it doesn’t make it any less amazing that I was a part of all that. For me, when I think of Juno I think of all the photos in my iPhone from when I was in Vancouver in February of 2007. That’s Juno to me. It’s the friends I made and the relationships I made. That’s what was important to me."