The Twilight World

With long, curly red hair, porcelain skin and a loud, infectious laugh, actress Rachelle Lefevre is hard to overlook. But until she appeared as the bitchy bloodsucker Victoria in the 2008 smash hit Twilight, she'd been a relative unknown. Now with the hotly anticipated second film in the series, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, hitting theaters November 20 and two more films in the works, Lefevre is about to find herself in the glare of the spotlight.

"When I first got to LA, everybody said I was too 'girl-next-door' for edgier roles," she says. "I ended up playing a stripper, an escort, a vampire and an off-her-rocker troubled poet. I keep playing roles that are not even close to the girl next door."

While Lefevre's upcoming projects will certainly keep her from being typecast, they also give the actress a chance to walk a mile in some very different shoes. In Barney's Version, she plays the manic-depressive, hippie-poet first wife of costar Paul Giamatti. In Casino Jack, she's a Washington, DC, power player (opposite Kevin Spacey and Jon Lovitz), a character that's based on real life press secretary Emily Miller.

"We'd gotten the suits together and [when we went] shopping for shoes, I bought these intensely spiky Fendi and Christian Dior stilettos," says Lefevre. "I felt she was a little bit 'vanity first,' and it helped me find her as a character. And I do that without judgment— depending on how you grow up and the circles you move in, you value different things, and I saw her as valuing really good heels."

When she's not on set, the 30-year-old Montreal native prefers J Brand jeans, tees, boots, blazers and a signature piece of chunky jewelry. Her last fashion splurge: a gray patent leather Chloé Eloise bag. And while she’ll also cop to Balmain and Stella McCartney obsessions, it’s at New York City's myriad vintage stores, including Cadillac's Castle and Zachary's Smile, that she gets her best retail therapy.

However, dressing up for Gotham's fashion shoot gave the actress a whole new appreciation for modern design. "There's quite a difference between putting on a regular dress and a dress that has a bodice built into it, and boning and all this invisible stuff underneath," she says. "I literally had a different body in these dresses. They're designed to physically make you, from the neck down, a better woman."