'Suhweeeet! Mandy Moore'
She's best pals with Jack Osbourne, wants to sing with Eminem (if she doesn't have to swear) and is a bona fide TV/movie/music star. Is this 18-year-old really as nice and well-balanced as she seems? Yes, she is!
Mandy Moore is 18, and lovers her parents. She doesn't smoke, and prays before bedtime. She's nice -- very nice -- really nice.
"I'm a really smiley, happy person," she says, smiling happily. "I'm freakin' 18 and doing everything I ever dreamed of!" She's sold more than 2 million copies of her first three records, hosted her own MTV show and starred in a film that opened at number 1. But wait -- did she just say freakin'?
"The occasional cuss word does come out of my mouth," she admits. "My dad says, 'That's not proper language for a young lady.' He doesn't even like me to say sucks."
Moore's parents are a strong presence in their daughter's life and career. Her father, Don, is a strict airline pilot who likes his child to buckle her seatbelt and put her tray in the upright position. Her mother, Stacy, travels with her, and has escorted her here to Toronto, where Moore is making a new film.
"Eighteen is typically the age when you're supposed to rebel against your parents," Moore acknowledges. She's wearing jeans, a T-shirt that reads I SURVIVED CATHOLIC SCHOOL and no jewelry except for a cross. "But I have an unusually close relationship with them. I tell my mom stuff I don't even tell my friends."
Still, she insists, "I'm not a goody-goody." For instance, she wants a tattoo. She's scared of needles, but would like to have some ink, "probably a cross, somewhere inconspicuous like my toe." What would Dad say? "He'd freak!"
Moore grew up in Orlando, Florida, the teen-pop capital of the world, and spent years in talent shows before her demo tape was sent to New York by an ambitious FedEx employee who had a connection at Epic Records. One day, Moore was a 14-year-old freshman wearing her Catholic school uniform, and the next she was recording "Candy," an adorable pop hit that rhymed with her first name. Her current thoughts on "Candy": "Ugh. It makes me cringe."
Since then, she says, "the type of music I want to make has changed." Her latest record, Mandy Moore, ditched bubblegum beats for more adult styles. "I had so much more creative control, and I'm hoping for even more on the next album."
Moore's maturation is evident in her film choices as well. She had her first starring role in this year's A Walk to Remember, playing -- what else? -- a cheerful, religious teen who won't have sex, and who is rewarded with the love of the school hunk and a fatal disease. Released earlier this year, Walk cost $11 million and grossed $41 million, which made her a Hollywood star, too.
In her new film, How to Deal, on the other hand, she plays a "cynical, jaded teenage girl who is kind of angry at the world." She even swears in the movie. "I say s-h-i-t," she giggles.
As befits an 18-year-old multimedia starlet, Moore recently moved to Los Angeles, and the rest of the family came as well. In March, hosting MTV Spring Break in Cancun, Mexico, she met Kelly and Jack Osbourne, the two teenagers most unlike her -- and now, oddly, her close friends. "Mandy is a woman," Jack says in a rare moment of reverence. "You can imagine she got sent to, like, a finishing school in Switzerland: perfect manners, never angry, so polite."
She'd also like to record a song with Eminem, whom she met at MTV Spring Break a few years ago. "I love him!" she exclaims. She would do a song with him, she says, "in a heartbeat." Unless he wanted her to swear, that is. "It would depend on what kind of swearing," she reasons.