Michelle Trachtenberg

As a young girl, Michelle Trachtenberg dreamed of being Michelle Kwan. Instead, she settled for a starring role in Ice Princess alongside the 1998 Olympic silver medalist.

With a talent and poise well beyond her years, Michelle Trachtenberg remains one of Hollywood’s most promising young actresses. Best known for her work as Buffy’s sister Dawn on the hit television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the 19-year-old New York native has sought to avoid pigeonholing by taking roles in such films as Harriet the Spy, Inspector Gadget, the raunchy R-rated comedy EuroTrip, Gregg Araki’s current indie Mysterious Skin and the G-rated Disney film Ice Princess, new this week on DVD.

The film didn’t exactly burn up the box office charts, debuting at number four with a first weekend take of $7 million. But the film looks poised to better connect with its core figure skating audience, even in the dog days of summer, thereby finally rewarding the efforts of Trachtenberg, who learned how to ice skate for her role as the brainy girl turned champion figure skater, Casey Carlyle.

“I trained extremely hard for this movie,” explains the avid tennis player and former ballerina during a recent interview with FilmStew. “When we weren’t shooting, I was training, five hours a day, five days a week. I had ballet every other day. I was constantly on the ice.”

“When we were shooting, I was working seven days a week,” she continues. “Five days of shooting and then, on the weekends, I was learning all the choreography and whatnot. I was working 20-22 hour days because I was one of the only adults on the movie, outside of Joan Cusack (who plays her mother) and Kim Cattrall (who plays her skating coach). Everyone else was pretty much a minor, so after 10 hours, they went home, and I was still there on ice skating, working my way around.”

Asked to compare the difficulty level of acting to that of ice skating, Trachtenberg says that skating is, by far, the harder of the two. “It’s cold and the skirts are short,” she says, laughing. “In the past, I’ve done a bikini scene and I was like, ‘I’m done. That’s it. That’s my sex scene.’ But, with this, I had the little skirts and everything.”

“My big thing, which none of my doubles could do, was an outside edge spread eagle, which is basically when your feet are in one line and you’re leaning back on the outside edge, going around on a curve,” Trachtenberg continues. “Not even a lot of skaters who are at Olympic levels can do that because it depends on your body.”

Even though Trachtenberg took to the sport, the rising star admits to her fair share of mishaps during filming. “I tore a couple of ligaments and dislocated a knee,” she admits. “And my knee cap is probably off kilter because, when you’re doing a spiral, you put all your weight on the knees.”

“It sounds really bad, but those are things that happen to athletes,” continues the girlfriend of X-Men 2 star Shawn Ashmore. “I’m very lucky because I didn’t get any stress fractures, which is one of the hugest things. I’d never trained to be an ice skater before, but when I was 8 or 9, that’s what I wanted to do. I was obsessed with Michelle Kwan and Oksana Baiul.”

“So when Disney came to me with this movie, I was like, ‘Okay. I can skate. No problem. I did it at a party once.’”

And after I started training, my coach came up to me and said, ‘If you had started this when you were five years old, you’d be able to do those double axles and everything.’ She said I was a natural at it, which was really cool.”

As a lifelong fan of Michelle Kwan, Trachtenberg found herself more tongue tied in the presence of the Olympic champion filmed than many of the Hollywood stars who preceded her in the actress’s life. “I was the biggest nerd,” Trachtenberg confesses. “I said, ‘You’re Michelle Kwan,’ like she didn’t know that she was Michelle Kwan, so I had to tell her.”

“To see her on the ice is like what I would imagine it’s like to watch Sean Penn or Dustin Hoffman work,” she adds. “It’s just so effortless and brilliant. And, she said to me, ‘You’re good. You’re a natural for what time you’ve had and what you’ve accomplished. I’m impressed.’ That, to me, was the utmost compliment.”

With three upcoming films - next week’s Lifetime movie The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, about a young woman who re-examines her life; Vinyl, about the women behind a male rock and roll band; and Odd Girl Out, about the students at a prestigious boarding school - Trachtenberg continues to maintain a professional pace that began at the tender age of three. But she always has a career in sales waiting for her.

“One day, I worked at a friend’s store,” she reveals. “It was baby store and I sold $5,000 worth of baby stuff in one day. I was literally pulling people in off the street, telling them, ‘You need to buy this. This is perfect and it’s so pretty, and you’re going to have babies someday, so you should be prepared.’”

“It was really fun, because I actually got to see and talk to people,” suggests Trachtenberg. “The one thing that you don’t get with movies is that you don’t actually get to talk to or experience the people that you’re putting these things out for. With sitcoms, the audience is right there. You can hear them laugh, immediately. With movies, you’ve got to wait for some time.”

But having been in the business for almost two decades now, Trachtenberg is still pretty clear when it comes to her career vision. “Every character that I play is like a tiny percent of my personality, sort of heightened, but I’m very adamant about never playing the same character again,” she explains. “Casey is my first character where I’ve had to be unconfident and scared and insecure.”