Ward met journalists in a back room in the House of Blues on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood to talk about the movie. Since The In Crowd was not screened in advance, the interview became more about her career and interests, from politics to animals to NASCAR. She did, fortunately, reveal a little bit about the film, including what co-star Laurie Fortier tastes like. 

Daily Radar: Do you have any interaction with your fans? 

 Susan Ward: I don't, I guess. I don't know. 

 DR: Do you get fan mail? 

SW: Yes, I do. I get a lot of fan mail. 

 DR: Do you ever visit your fan sites? 

SW: I don't have a computer so I don't go online a lot. If I go to my boyfriend's office or Howie's [her agent's] office, I try to go online, but those trips are few and far between. I'm not really that computer savvy, I must say. 

DR: Do you get recognized a lot? 

 SW: No, not at all. 

 DR: Are you ever mistaken for someone else? 

 SW: Well, let's see. In the past two days I've gotten Yasmine Bleeth, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Scarlett O'Hara. 

 DR: How about Denise Richards? 

 SW: You know what? I used to, when I was a lot younger. Now, I don't as much any more. She was modeling at the same time. We didn't work together, but I knew who she was in New York. Actually, my grandmother had a picture of her up in her house. 

 DR: Because she thought it was you? 

 SW: Yes. 

 DR: Are you related to Sela Ward? 

 SW: No, but she is a beautiful, beautiful lady. 

DR: Is it true that you're running for President? 

SW: I'm running for Vice President, thank you very much. 

 DR: Of America? 

 SW: Of the United States, yes. 

 DR: Who is your running mate? 

 SW: His name is - Hang on, I'll tell you. Howie? I can't remember his name right now. Howie, what's the president's name? [He doesn't remember either] Andrew... Let's say Mr. Andrew. He's the editor of Maxim magazine, and he's running for president, and he needed a running mate. [maybe Andrew Ryan, art editor -Ed.] 

DR: Explain how this came about. 

 SW: I don't know how it happened. 

 DR: What is your platform? 

 SW: My platform is to have fun and really turn this country around and just get rid of the stupid laws, stupid sexual laws. We're gonna have open parties at the White House, and we're still discussing and still doing everything. We just did our first shoot together, and we're gonna start our whole campaign soon. 

 DR: This is for the 2000 election? 

 SW: Yes. 

 DR: Do you have a party affiliation? 

 SW: Our own independent. The Maxim party. 

 DR: Can you give us any more details about the laws you're fighting? 

 SW: I don't know exactly. We haven't had our big discussion, so I'm really not at liberty to say what all is going on, because we haven't had our formal meeting. We've just done the press, the photo shoots for it. We're supposed to have some sort of meeting and figure everything out, but we've just done the photo shoots. 

 DR: Your bio says you were discovered by a modeling agent in a mall. Did some guy just walk up to you at 13 and say, "Hey kid, wanna be a model?" 

SW: He offered me some candy and took me to the bathroom. [laughs] 

DR: But seriously, how does an agent approach a 13-year-old girl? 

SW: An agency out of New Orleans saw me in a mall and offered to take me to New York to a modeling competition. My mother was with me, and my parents said I was crazy, and there's no way in hell they're gonna let their daughter do this, but I sort of talked them into it. My mom had taken me to New York a few years before when she had some sort of conference, and I always said I wanted to move to New York. So, my parents said, "Fine, we'll send you to New York for a week, and you'll have a good time, get it out of your system." So, I met with a bunch of agencies, and Ford offered me a contract. As a little girl growing up, you always hear about the smiling Ford models, and it's a dream. When I was offered a contract, I was absolutely stunned that someone saw something enough in me to offer me something like that. So, my parents said yes. I wanted to go to veterinarian school at the time, and my parents really couldn't afford to send me, and it's a great opportunity for a young girl to make a lot of money really quickly. And it's not brain surgery. It's not a lot of hard work, and I could do it in the summers and during the year I could do it, but I had to make straight A's. I had to go home to Louisiana once a month. I had a wonderful time. I wouldn't change it for the world. And it was a great, great opportunity for me and it's opened a ton of doors. 

 DR: What ever happened with veterinary school? 

 SW: Well, as I got older, I got a little bit more squeamish and I realized that I was making a lot of money, and I didn't have to go to school for 15 years. 

 DR: Do you really have a pet monkey? 

 SW: My mom did have a monkey, and unfortunately it recently died when she was here visiting me at Thanksgiving. His name was Jacobi. My mom does a lot of volunteer work with the zoo in Monroe [Louisiana, her home town], and they had a baby monkey with a clubbed right foot and a clubbed left foot, so the parents shunned him, and they were gonna put him to sleep. My mom said, "Oh, can I please have him." They said fine, so she got one of the doctors in town to do surgery to correct the clubbed foot and she had him for years. It was like a child. It wore diapers; it slept in the house, it had a cage, a playpen, and it had a little stuffed animal. You fed it a bottle every two hours. It's just like having a child, an infant, but, unfortunately, he got pneumonia, and the doctor wasn't quite able to [save him.] But it's okay. He bit me last time I saw him. 

 DR: You also race stock cars? 

 SW: Yeah, I went down to Vegas quite a few times and raced on a track there. It's a great time. I just love it so much and I grew up watching it. Instead of going to church on Sundays, we'd watch races. 

DR: What does it feel like to drive those cars? 

SW: It's such a rush, and I can't even describe the feeling. You don't even realize you're going that fast. 

DR: How fast do you go? 

SW: My top speed is, like, 140.3 I think. 

 DR: Filming on The In Crowd wrapped last fall. What have you been doing in the meantime? 

SW: It's been such a whirlwind because when I got back I wrapped Sunset Beach. I had a month left of filming there, and that was the end of the show, so that was pretty emotional. You'd been working with the same people for three years, and that was all coming to an end, plus I'd been gone for three months, and I knew that it was probably coming to an end. But, I was working elsewhere and trying to focus on that, and then I came back to this, and it was a little overwhelming. I was doing a lot of press because you have to do it months and months before, like a lot of the photo shoots. So, I was doing a ton of photo shoots and things for The In Crowd, and then Christmas came and then in January, you know, you just start all over again with the press, and then pilot season came, and so it's just been a whirlwind. I haven't stopped. 

DR: Did soap opera work prepare you at all for feature a film? 

 SW: You do so much dialogue everyday; you do so much work and a lot of it is repetition. Your brain is just a muscle like any other part of your body. You train it, so you basically learn to have a photographic memory. You look at it [the script], and a lot of it is what you said before. Some of it's new, and you sort of get your blocks of time, five or six chunks of time in an hour, and you get the gist of what you're gonna say, and you just kind of go with it. You learn a lot by working at a very fast rate, learn to retain a lot for short periods of time. 

 DR: What was it like being evacuated from the set for Hurricane Floyd? 

 SW: Oh, being evacuated, that was a lot of fun. The first hurricane came, and we thought that we were gonna be blown away, but it somehow became really small. I'm not quite sure what the first one was called, but Floyd was the second one that came, and I remember when -- we were filming in a beauty parlor. There's a scene where we're getting a pedicure, Lori Heuring and I, and we were filming right in downtown [Charleston, S.C.] and we'd been hearing about this hurricane. We were all quite worried, but we couldn't evacuate until our insurance kicked in. So, that night when we were filming at the beauty salon, our executive producer Mike Rachmil came in and said, "Look, let me just let you know, everyone's leaving town. The hurricane is gonna be really bad, but we can't leave until mandatory evacuation is declared. We don't know exactly when that's gonna be, but when we finish filming tonight, go home, pack everything that you have, bring it to work with you in the morning." Call time's at 6 a.m., by the way, and it's 11:30 at night. So, you don't get your turnaround, but go and pack everything that you own from being down here for two and a half months, pack it all in a matter of two hours, get some sleep and learn your lines. 

My mom had been calling. She was freaking out because she had been hearing it on the radio, but it was a little nerve-wracking at the time. So, I went home and I packed everything up, plus I had my three cats. So, I'm thinking, "What the hell am I gonna do with my cats?" I get to work the next day, and, of course, I'm working the next morning. It couldn't have been one of those days that I had off. They finally call mandatory at noon. Boom, we chucked the cameras and everyone says, "Go home, get your bags and we're leaving in an hour and a half." So, I got home, packed my cats, and we had this whole convoy of cars and luggage, and the place we evacuated to was Gaffney, which was two hours away. It took us 17 hours to get there. Every road was just gridlocked. You sat there for hours and hours. 

 DR: What did you do to pass time for 17 hours? 

 SW: We drank a lot, but we weren't drinking and driving because you only went a mile in an hour. I don't think the cops were too interested in pulling us over because we weren't moving, and we brought a lot of fireworks and shot a lot of fireworks at each other. 

 DR: At each other? 

SW: Yeah, at different cars and at each other. You know, switch cars, talk to different people, hear the gossip from the car in front of you, the car behind you. It was actually a lot of fun. Where we went, it didn't rain. We played golf and went shopping all day. 

DR: What was your biggest challenge in making The In Crowd? 

 SW: There's a little bit of violence in the movie and a little bit of nudity in the movie, so that was probably the most difficult thing to get past. But, by the time I had done a lot of those [scenes], I knew the crew very, very well. They were just like family, so that made me very comfortable. 

 DR: Is it true there's a scene where you make out with Laurie Fortier? 

 SW: Mm-hmm. 

 DR: Tell us about it. 

 SW: It's very funny, because it was raining that night. None of the crew guys were ever around [during shooting], but that night every single guy was standing around the dry dock. We were fine with it just because we had talked and said, "Look, be as comfortable as possible. Just make it look good." That's all we wanted to do. But it was so funny. We had so many bugs around, and we had so much bug spray that every time we kissed - I had to lick her stomach and I got it all in my mouth, so it's not as romantic as it looks. 

 DR: How many takes did you do? 

 SW: We did quite a bit. I don't know, probably 10. We were in a boat, and the camera was stationary, so the boat was being pulled. So, it wasn't as if it was just a camera set up on the couch. So, that caused a lot of problems. 

DR: Is there anything like that going on in this scene we have a picture of, where you and Lori Heuring are dancing together? 

 SW: This is a rave scene where I have taken Adrien [Heuring's character] out for a fun night on the town, and we're having sort of a little seduction dance between the two of us. 

 DR: Is there any social significance to a brunette being the power seductress in a society that worships blondes? 

SW: Oh, good question. That's hard to say because it's a "to each his own" situation. People like blondes; people like brunettes, and to be in a position of power maybe brunettes typically have been less intimidating than blondes because men always see blondes as sort of the beautiful blonde, big hair, perfect Barbie blonde. That's what men think about when they think of blondes in some aspects. Some men do. I think it's the Barbie syndrome. You think of Barbie the perfect girl and then there's Skipper, her little friend. She's the girl you can talk to who walks your dog, so she's less intimidating and sort of the more carefree have a good time girl. 

 DR: What is it like being in your mid-20s going back to high school age for the role? 

 SW: Well, the role is more college age, early 20s, but it is still sort of the younger crowd. It was fun. I really don't consider myself to be in my mid-20s now, but I am, I guess -- 24. 

 DR: How do you react to being perceived as a sex symbol? 

 SW: It's very strange to look at these pictures. You go into a photo shoot, and you're made up, your hair is done, your makeup's done, and they make you look amazing. You don't look like that every day, and you look at these pictures like, "Is that really me? Do I look like that?" No, you don't look like that 24 hours a day. No, you don't always wear makeup. No, you don't always look wonderful, and to be called a sex symbol is sort of a little weird, and when you see someone in person, it's a little disenchanting. For people to perceive you as that is just a little unrealistic to me.