The Roommate, released in 2011, placed her in a different kind of role: the psychological thriller antagonist. She played Rebecca, the disturbed college student who becomes obsessed with her roommate Sara (played by Minka Kelly) to dangerous effect. The role required her to perform a specific kind of controlled menace — the surface pleasantness that masks the escalating interior disorder — and she played it in a register that critics noted as committing to the genre’s conventions while finding genuine moments of unease within them.
The Roommate is not a prestigious film. It is a product of the specific genre machinery that produces psychological thrillers for the college-aged demographic, and it operates with the genre’s conventions rather than against them. Playing the antagonist in such a film is a specific kind of professional exercise: the character’s function in the narrative is to be wrong in ways the audience can recognize, and the performance’s task is to make the wrongness interesting rather than simply legible.
What both Country Strong and The Roommate illustrate, taken together, is the range of the post-Gossip Girl work she was pursuing while the show was still in production. She was not waiting for the show to end before establishing a film presence; she was building it alongside the show, in films that occupied different generic registers and different narrative positions. The girl who had grown up as a working professional — booking whatever was in front of her, working across different formats — was doing the same thing now, with a larger public profile and a somewhat more visible public profile.