Actress Blair gets 'Down' 'n edgy By Christopher Cousino Daily Arts Editor Who can say they've shared a liplock with handsome hotty Ryan Phillipe, the goofy, cute Freddie Prinze, Jr. and the heartstopping Jared Leto? None other than 1995 University graduate Selma Blair. And she's not complaining. "That seems to be all I do these days and God bless it. It's not a bad way to make a living," jokes Blair. Her most recent peck on the lips comes with Prinze, Jr. in the latest teen flick "Down To You," which opened Friday. It's a story of first love between Al (Prinze, Jr.) and Imogen (Julia Stiles) set during the college years in New York City. Blair doesn't consider this a teen movie. "This one's growing up a little. This one's college. It's just a very sweet honest story about first love and going back to first love if it falls apart." In "Down To You," Blair plays Cyrus, "kinda the other woman," she described. "Actually what's boiled down to a pretty small part because, as usual, I didn't facilitate anyone else's storyline. If Freddie fell for me, you wouldn't like him so much. You really want to like Freddie and Julia, so I'm the bad seed that wound up a little bit on the cutting room floor, which is a OK because I had a great time working on it anyhow." Blair credits much of the fun to Prinze, Jr., whom she considers "such a dear friend." "Right away, we hit it off. We were always goofy with each other. And I read in some magazine that he wrote, 'Selma's me with breasts.' I guess he's never seen me naked because that's not my body type," laughed Blair. "He left this message on my machine before we started shooting and said, 'Hi Selma. I don't know if you know me, my name is Freddie Prinze, Jr. and I'm going to be doing your next movie,' and I was like, 'My NEXT movie?,' I have a bit part in his next movie. So I walked into that knowing it was going to be a really great set." After wrapping "Down To You," Blair jumped sets onto a yet-to-be-released film called "A Leonard Cohen Afterworld," featuring a "fairy tale love story" with Leto. "It's so clearly a not a teen movie," warned Blair, "because it's very edgy. It's a guy road trip movie. It's got drugs and it's got sex. I play a girl from Michigan who goes out to L.A. to find stardom and it fails." Moving out of the teen genre Blair said, "I was actually playing a 25-year-old, so it was great to break out of the whole David Cassidy type." Courtesy of Miramax Selma Blair stars in "Down To You." Originally on page 5A in the 1-24-2000 issue of the Daily.