Jennifer Love Hewitt: the Internet's become a shrine to her. From her start as the girl in the barbie commercials, now she's on a career-altering path

ERIC MCCORMACK: OK, let me get this out of the way: Any residual anger I had over your not coming to see me on Broadway last summer in The Music Man is gone. I've let it go. It's out there in the ether.

JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT: But I schedule my life around your show [Will & Grace], so that makes up for it, right? It's my favorite show on TV.

EM: Me, too. So, I've known you now for four years. In that time, it seems, the public's and particularly the press' perception of you onscreen and as a person is, and I can't believe I'm going to quote Britney Spears, "not a girl, not yet a woman." It's a limbo place that must be very frustrating, yet at the same time it seems like an image that you've cultivated. Discuss..

JLH: Well, I am 23, so I have a business side that is very adult, but I also have a side that's confused and still trying to figure out who I am.

EM: And yet romantically you are a woman. You've had many boyfriends yet you've never discussed most of them, which is very classy. But I think we only allow young celebrities to grow up when we see them have relationships that fail. You've only gone through that once publicly, so we still see you as an innocent girl. Again, is that something you do on purpose?

JLH: Yeah. After my breakup with [MW host] Carson [Daly], which was very public, I went from being somebody who was very open about talking about that stuff, to somebody who no longer is. I found that as more of my life got out there, I liked having a part of me that's private. And you know, I haven't found a big, serious relationship that I'm ready to put up on some billboard.

EM: Well, you've had a very public romance with Jackie Chan. Does he know Kama Sutra the way he knows tae kwon do? [Hewitt laughs] Your movie with Jackie, The Tuxedo, is coming out in October. Good times?

JLH: Oh, yeah. It was really cool. He plays a spy, and I play his partner. He's unbelievable. I've never met anybody who works harder than Jackie.

EM: Did you do your own stunts, like he does?

JLH: A lot of them. There were a couple of falls and flips that I didn't do. He [Chan] actually had one of his stunt guys dress up in my costume and do one stunt in my place.

EM: And did he look hot?

JLH: Very hot. He enjoyed having breasts.

EM: Particularly yours. So, we're neighbors, but we never see each other. Explain.

JLH: I saw you walking your dogs recently but I didn't say "Hi," because you looked kind of peaceful and I didn't want to disturb the moment.

EM: I do occasionally walk the dogs past your house and turn to them and say, "You see girls, back when she was just a TV star, we could go up and knock on her door. But now that she's been working with Sir Anthony [Hopkins, on the upcoming film The Devil and Daniel Webster] we aren't worthy."

JLH: [laughs] You can always knock on my door.

EM: That would be the door you share with your mother. You've had to answer this question many times, but--

JLH: --do I like living with my mother?

EM: Well, you are 23. Are you getting to a point where you're thinking, Mom, love ya, but I think I need my own space?

JLH: No. I really like my situation. A big thing for me is safety and I wouldn't sleep at night if I lived on my own. I would feel so unsafe. And there's a big part of me that sometimes thinks, What I do is the craziest thing in the world, and part of my living at home is to remind myself that the entertainment industry is completely different from real life. When I come home and my mom tells me to clean my room and take out the trash, it brings reality into my day.

EM: Do you ever turn to your mother and say, "Hey, I'm Jennifer Love Hewitt! Why don't you take the garbage out!?" [Hewitt laughs) Because on occasion I will turn to my wife and say, "Hey, I'm Jennifer Love Hewitt! Why don't you take the garbage out!?"

JLH: [laughs] Really?

EM: Yeah. She gets a little confused.

JLH: Maybe that's why she looks at me funny. But no, for now I really like my living situation.

EM: For the record I have to tell our readers my favorite "Love" story. We were shooting [The] Audrey Hepburn [Story, 2000] in Montreal, and one night we went out to a karaoke bar. Love was wearing a kerchief, looking very demure but, actually, no one was looking at her--everyone was very cool, very French-like. And I said to her, "If they have one of your songs here, you have to sing it," and she said, "They won't." And sure enough they had--

JLH: --"How Do I Deal."

EM: And as soon as she got up, everyone went insane. The French cool broke down, the kerchief came off and she sang her own song in a karaoke bar.

JLH: [laughs] We had a good time.

EM: I told this story apropos of singing. When you were a teenager, you were recording, releasing albums in Japan and here in the States. But you haven't really pursued that over the last couple of years.

JLH: No, but I have a new album called Bare Naked [Jive] coming out this summer, hopefully. I've been working on it for almost a year now.