Drawn to Lynchian roles, the 23-year-old actress is right at home in the upcoming psych-horror flick The Ruins. She ought to be. In real life, she's seen her share of the dark side. Ray Rogers reveals the Method to her madness.

Jena Malone’s precociousness was present from the start. Her chilling big screen debut as the young Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright—who suffers tremendous abuse at the hands of an alcoholic father, in 1996’s Bastard Out of Carolina—garnered her a SAG nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She was eleven.

Watching her easy grace and commanding presence on screen over the intervening years—even in small but pivotal roles like the knowing narrator-sister to Emile Hirsch in last year’s Into The Wild—it’s easy to see why she’s often been compared to Jodie Foster (she even played a young version of Foster in 1997’s Contact). Hearing her rhapsodize about her “craft” makes the case even clearer that Malone, now 23, is something special, several notches above the current generation of young actresses wobbling through Hollywood.