The early years in Los Angeles produced a string of guest appearances on various television productions. She appeared on Tarzan, the short-lived 2003 series that reimagined the Edgar Rice Burroughs character in a contemporary New York setting. She appeared on House, on 24, on Entourage, and on Veronica Mars and Surface. These are the kinds of credits that don’t appear prominently in an eventual biography but that constitute the actual work of building a career in American television: the character actor training that happens one episode at a time, one set at a time, in the company of experienced crews and more established performers.
Her film debut was Hangman’s Curse (2003), adapted from a Frank Peretti novel. It is not a film that appears frequently in discussions of her work. It was the beginning of a feature film résumé that would eventually include more significant credits, but at that point it was simply the first feature — the threshold crossed.
The modeling work continued alongside the acting work. She was, throughout this period, a working professional in two parallel industries, managing the financial and scheduling demands of both while attending school in whatever form the schedule allowed. This is a more complex logistical and psychological situation than it might appear from the outside. The entertainment industry’s attitude toward young workers has always been complicated — it values them, it uses them, and it often fails to adequately protect them from the specific pressures that come with professional visibility at ages when psychological identity is not yet fully formed.