Really, though, Ashley Scott's current place in Hollywood is hardly midway between commercial success and outsider cachel; it's more like another planet entirely. She seems to have stumbled into an acting career after spending the better part of a decade as a successful international model. "I just wanted to have fun and explore [acting]... I never thought that i would go as far as it has" she says. Scott doesn't seem enticed by fame. "I have many friends that are typically famous and always in the public eye abd have paparazzi following them around -it just looks miserable to me". She sees herself less as an actor than as a future mother. "This is fun and all, but I think I want start a family". Maybe most telling, she's in no particular hurry to force her career to the next level. "If I just could stay where Im right now... for the rest of this career, I'd be happy." Words you don't normally heard from an actress who's truly making moves toward the big leagues, whether she knows it or not.

Scott's career has been ready to break from nearly the moment she stepped into Hollywood. A bit part in Artificial Intelligence:AI, and a recurring role in Dark Angel almost led to a co-starring role in the reasonable hyped, but short lived television series Birds of Prey, in 2002. Sinc then, Scott has received increasingly significant roles in S.W.A.T., Walking Tall, Trespassing, as well as Into the Blue, with Jessica Alba.

Despite her steady progress, she is a refreshingly candid -almost comical in Hollywood- take on her work and what she has been hired to do. "Into the Blue is not an Oscar-winning perfomance, but that's not what the movie is about. it's not necessarily about character development," she tells me, "I'm this mid-20s, blond, tall type of girl. I get it."

She's been getting it for a while, and Scott has always a pretty ood understanding of what her beauty is worth. After growing up in South Carolina, she quit school at 16 and left home to model for the Elite agency in Miami. It wasn't long before she was living in Manhattan and, eventually, Paris. "So many people have so many horror stories about modeling, about how it was so terrible for them," she says. "But I really enjoyed it. I took it as a real positive experience. i left home when I was 16 and -to be able to travel and make money- it was really, really amazing," she continues. "But after eight or nine years of it, I just felt like a clothes hanger."

While the move from modeling to acting seems like natural transition for many, Scott has a way of describing it as merely fun idea that she wanted to try out. "I just wanted to explore it," she recalles, "It was [about] seeing if I could do it, and if I liked it. I wondered if there was something out there that kind of got my juices flowing again."

Scott's juices have since been flowing, and she's been getting audience's juices flowing, as well, I ask her if she thinks that many of the roles she has been offered have encouraged her to explore her sex appeal a lottle more than her acting ability. "Of course!" she laughs, sounding amused that I would think otherwise. "Look: my husband's a producer [Anthony Rhulen, producer of Raise your voice and The Butterfly Eeffect]. i get it. I get what people want to see," she tells me. "I want to see Paul Walker with a shirt off, too. You know what I mean?"

While Scott is comfortable emphasizing her sexuality, she's equaly comfortable with the fact that such roles will not always be available to her. "i'm doing what's there right now." she says. "But it's the natural progression of life: things change. Someday I won't be playing that person anymore, becouse I won't be that person." Difficult as it may be to believe, she seems to have not fear at all about actally not being that person. She appears to be ready to get on with her life, even if that means not being a movie star.

"i'd love to do this forever, but I'm kind of a mom, and I'd really love to settle down and have kids," she says. "In the next couple of years I thi k having children is going to be my number one priority, I'm an old-fashioned girl from South Carolina." Although her photograph suggest something a little more racy, there's the sweetest tone in her voice, and specially her laugh, that let's you know just where she's coming from..