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In Stiles

"She's both extremely intuitive and extremely intellectual, which is rare," adds Obst. "I see her as a worker and a thinker and a philosopher in a weird way. My exchange with her is as rich as with any sort of college professor." Obst lowers her voice dramatically. "I don't want to make her feel uncomfortable by saying this, but she has a small savant quality."

Stiles first attracted serious attention in 1998, when The Anarchist's Daughter, a screenplay she co-wrote with McGrath and Scott Saunders, was accepted into Sundance's Screenwriter's Lab. That same year, her low-budget thriller Wicked appeared in the Sundance Film Festival. The movie wasn't notable so much for its story line (Julia plays a precocious teen who gets too close to her father when her mother is murdered) as for the quirky talent of its young star. The buzz quickly propelled her out of the world of cattle calls and auditions and won her a reputation as a skilled if slightly somber actor. "When I used to audition for commercials," she says, "I'd always get people telling me, 'You have to go in and light up the room and be bubbly and talk a lot!' " She groans at the memory. "But my mom has a mantra, 'I am what I am and that's all that I am,' and it's very helpful."

So her character in 10 Things I Hate About You, a prickly teenager repulsed by her popularity-seeking peers, isn't too much of a stretch. The truth is, Stiles makes an unlikely ingenue. She's not terribly good at small talk and is appalled by artifice. In her parachute pants and Puma flip-flops, she looks less like a Hollywood starlet than like the soccer player she was in high school. "I sense that she's uncomfortable with superficiality," says Obst. "She's afraid she's going to get it wrong. She doesn't know the lines she's supposed to say in certain kinds of ritual conversation. You have to actually talk with her and engage her."

In her cluttered hotel suite -- her home for two months -- Julia sits behind a coffee table piled with flowers, schoolbooks (Conceptual Physics, The Bhagavad Gita), and a Hampshire College brochure. (Earlier this morning, she took a Spanish exam online.) She is, of course, dying to graduate this May. She's applied to schools she didn't have the time to visit and figures she'll take a year off, make a few movies, and "travel and be human." Her plan was partly inspired by the advice she got from her Hamlet co-star Bill Murray, who plays her father, Polonius. "Right after Ghostbusters, or whichever movie totally made him a superstar, he studied in Paris and traveled around Asia," she says. "His agent couldn't even get him on the phone. Bill said, 'You can't take this too seriously and let it run your life.' "