Steve Pratt talks to up and coming actress Samaire Armstong about success, acting... and shopping.

SAMAIRE Armstrong is talking about what she likes to do, but the American actress from The O.C. and Entourage can't quite bring herself to say it. "I like to do a lot of things but my very favourite thing, my sole purpose on earth, I mean this sounds very awful but..." her voice tails off. The sentence has to be completed for her. Her favourite thing is shopping.

"The goal is to get to the shop to shop, but if in that time I can help save the world, that's a good thing," she adds.

Clothes, shoes, nicknacks, shiny things, glittery things are all on her shopping list. She loves Selfridges and Top Shop. And thrift - that's charity, to us - shops "because I grew up in a trailer home in the middle of a forest, we were gipsies who travelled to many strange places," she continues.

"As a young girl in high school, you don't want to look like everybody else and if there's no shopping you don't want to go in outlet stores, so the thrift stores were the best place. Then you don't want to look like the grandmother who left the old clothes there, so you start to sew.

"So that's when I started sewing and that's when the clothing line started."

We shouldn't be talking shopping, but about her new movie It's A Boy Girl Thing, a teen comedy in which she and Kevin Zegers play high school students who switch bodies. The obvious question about what attracted her to the project elicits a not-so-obvious answer. "To tell you the truth I wasn't attracted to it. I'm very positive about this film, I think it's a good film. As a script, at first I skim it and see a body-switching movie and think, 'no' and put it to one side. They said read it again, they really want you to do it."

Then Elton John - yes, THE Elton John - kept calling as the movie comes from Rocket Pictures, his and partner David Furnish's production company. Eventually she said yes. Meeting Elton was just as problematical because she had a dream about him the night before. "I dreamt that I met him and he ignored me, and I went on a podium and said I wanted them all to know that Elton John ignored me," she explains.

"The next day he came to the set and rolled up in his Rolls Royce or some fancy car with his driver, and I imagined him having a purple suit and a cup of tea. He rolled down his window and I said, 'I had a dream and you ignored me'. He was like, that would never happen and rolled it back up. After we met more and more we got along really well and I got to go to their wedding, which was amazing. So I think I'm part of his family now."

Armstrong progressed from playing Anna, one of Seth's squeezes, in The O.C. to Entourage, shown on ITV over here. With a "breakthrough of the year" award to her name, she went into movies - the thriller Stay Alive, Just My Luck with Lindsay Lohan and now It's A Boy Girl Thing. Born in Japan, she lived in Hawaii and Arizona growing up. She describes her parents as gipsies. Her father studied martial arts, combative behaviour. A legacy from living in Japan as a child is that she trained in sword-fighting and judo. So far, she hasn't used them on screen.

"I've come to a place in my life where I no longer drink or take drugs. Drugs and alcohol have consumed a large percentage of our young. We have so many kids with ambition and drive but not direction," she says, getting serious.

"It gets scary - we can do whatever we want and accomplish whatever we want but when we start to, we don't know what to do with it. I went down that road, but now I don't do that and want to participate in that life we're able to lead. This is what we dream about as kids, and we're here and we're really lucky."

Armstrong says that "I've always wanted to live a life worth writing a book about." She seems to be well on the way.

* It's A Boy Girl Thing (12A) is now showing in cinemas.