COMEDIC KATE ACTRESS BOSWORTH TAPS INTO HER LIGHTER SIDE TO LAND ROLE IN 'TAD HAMILTON'.

Byline: Evan Henerson Staff Writer

Somewhere in the midst of a long casting process that preceded filming the romantic comedy, ``Win a Date With Tad Hamilton!'' director Robert Luketic had coffee with the young ``Blue Crush'' actress Kate Bosworth.

Luketic had had his eye on Bosworth anyway for Rosalee Futch, ``Tad Hamilton's'' ingenue role. But the meeting made Bosworth's stock rise.

``She grabbed my hand, looked me in the eye and said, 'You don't understand, Robert, I have to do this.' '' recalls Luketic, whose last film was the hit ``Legally Blonde.'' ``I said, 'Why?' She said, 'You don't understand. I am Rosalee Futch.' I was very amused by that.''

The remark, Bosworth says, requires some clarification.

She'd certainly like to be as sweet, good-hearted and trusting as the Piggly Wiggly checkout clerk from Fraziers Bottom, W.Va. (We don't make up these names, folks. That's an actual West Virginia town.) ``Tad Hamilton'' sees 21-year-old Rosalee torn between a Hollywood hunk (Josh Duhamel), with whom she wins a dream date, and Pete Monash (Topher Grace), the Piggly Wiggly manager who has been secretly in love with Rosalee his entire life. Complicating matters is the fact that onetime bad boy Tad becomes so smitten with Rosalee after but one date that he vows to reform - and moves out to Fraziers Bottom to be near her.

We won't tell you which suitor, if any, ultimately wins our heroine's heart, but the movie makes it clear she'd probably do just fine with either Pete or Tad. The Rosalee Futches of the world, the movie suggests, tend to improve the people around them.

Pure as the ...

``What I tried to do is take all of my best qualities and eliminate the bad ones,'' says Bosworth, ``to take the qualities I admire in other people and roll it all up into one person. She sees the best in people, really wanting to see the good in situations. That's her sweet naivete and innocence. She's just kind of a kindhearted soul. It's fun to play somebody like that.

``I think everyone has those qualities,'' continues Bosworth. ``My mom for one. My mom is amazing. She just left (the hotel suite). She's a lot like that.''

People filter in and out of the Beverly Hills hotel suite where Bosworth, 21, is doing her ``Tad Hamilton'' interviews. (The film opened last weekend). The actress had recently arrived from Berlin, where she is shooting the Bobby Darin biography ``Beyond the Sea'' for star and director Kevin Spacey. Playing Darin's wife, the actress Sandra Dee, Bosworth gets to age from virginal 16-year-old to a washed-up and nearly alcoholic 27. There is, if not a career trajectory, certain a craving for variety in Bosworth's choice of roles. As Bosworth tells it, the first two scripts she read on the way back from Hawaii after filming ``Blue Crush'' were for ``Tad Hamilton'' and James Cox's ``Wonderland,'' the account of porn star John Holmes and the Wonderland Avenue murders. Rosalee Futch barely occupies the same planet as the role of Dawn Schiller, Holmes' strung-out, teenage girlfriend, who Bosworth plays in ``Wonderland.'' But having just played a tomboy surfer, Bosworth was anxious to tackle a role - or two - that audiences had never seen her try.

``I called my agent and said I'd really love to do ('Wonderland' and 'Tad Hamilton') back to back - in a perfect world,'' she says. ``And it worked out that way.

``I absolutely detest the idea of anybody being pigeonholed or boxed,'' she adds. ``I think it's ridiculous, actually, because everybody has layers. Really, what a character is is taking a certain aspect and magnifying it up on the screen. So I've been lucky, really lucky, that I've gotten the projects I have that are completely different from each other.''

Now, seriously

``Wonderland'' co-writer/director James Cox also has a ``first meeting with Kate Bosworth'' story. And even though Bosworth didn't insist, ``I am Dawn Schiller,'' the director came away from the meeting thinking she could play the part and hold her own against veteran performers like Val Kilmer and Lisa Kudrow.

``With a character that age, you're looking for an actress who's going to have less experience, so my thing is just the vibe,'' says Cox. ``I got this feeling that Kate was a wise old soul, that the well ran really deep with her. And by the time I finished shooting, what I felt in that room proved absolutely to be the case.''

``Tad Hamilton'' is, Bosworth notes, her first comedy. Surrounded though she is by a sitcom star (``That 70s Show's'' Grace), a sure-handed comedy director in Luketic and veteran character players Nathan Lane and Sean Hayes, Bosworth found her comedy initiation a little difficult at times.

``For me, it was scary because it was such unknown territory,'' says Bosworth, adding that now that she's been bitten by the romantic comedy bug, she's anxious to do another one. ``Dramas are hard in their own sense in that you have to really open your heart and pour your emotions from your experience into what's on the screen. But (comedy) is almost a bit more technically difficult.''

There are, admittedly, not a lot of merry moments in Bosworth's earlier films. She landed her movie debut at age 13 in Robert Redford's ``The Horse Whisperer,'' largely because of her equestrian abilities. She followed that up with roles in ``The Newcomers'' the TV series ``Young Americans,'' and ``Remember the Titans.''

Saddling up

When she auditioned for ``The Horse Whisperer,'' Bosworth said, she had no idea acting was in her future. ``The only confidence I had was horseback riding,'' she says. ``And yeah, if I hadn't been a horseback rider, I'm sure I would have been terrified and hated the experience. I didn't know anything.''

Acting, she says, has fostered a certain self-reliance that the teenage Kate Bosworth didn't necessarily possess. Born in Los Angeles but raised largely on the East Coast, Bosworth moved around to accommodate the job demands of her father, who works in retail.

``We ended up moving every four or five years, which is great for me, actually, because I'm an only child and every four or five years I'd switch cities and schools,'' Bosworth says. ``I think it created an independence that's invaluable to me now.

``At the time, it was awful,'' she adds. ``But it's always through struggle, isn't it, that you sort of gain the strength?''

She'll return to the East Coast to attend Princeton University. Bosworth got accepted out of high school but received a deferment when her career began to take off.

She's glad she waited but is anxious to hit the books. She plans to study psychology or ``anything to do with literature, because I'm a crazy avid reader.''

``Between the years of 18 and 21, those are pretty big years to grow up. For me, that's where my growing pains occurred - magnified by the fact that it was somewhat in the public eye. Now I'm starting to get a little bit really wanting to kind of challenge my mind a bit in the study way again.''

Evan Henerson, [phone]

evan.henerson(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo: (1 -- cover -- color) A date with Kate Bosworth

Actress winning over many besides `Tad Hamilton'

(2) no caption (Kate Bosworth)

(3) Robert Luketic

(4) Kate Bosworth, 21, shows a more dramatically minded side of herself as the strung-out, teenage girlfriend of Val Kilmer's porn star John Holmes in ``Wonderland.''