All Pop - Movies

HOLLYWOOD -- Freddie Prinze Jr. made it on to People Magazine's sexiest 50 guys list. But the mention of the selection is enough to make his eyes roll.

"It sucks, man," says Prinze, trying to sound persuasive at a Beverly Hills hotel suite.

"Dude, you don't understand my friends. I was out of town when the magazine thing happened, so I check my answering machine the next day.

"Everyone was like, 'What's up, pretty boy? How you feeling, Princess? This is your ugly friend.' "

Prinze still gets razzed by his buddies, but he's okay with that. He gives as good as he gets, something he's learned after his star started to shine with I Know What You Did Last Summer.

The 24-year-old son of the late comic actor, Freddie Prinze, is too busy to worry about the teasing, anyway. He's currently shooting a baseball movie in North Carolina called Summer Catch.

The avid comic-book reader also is anxiously waiting to hear if he's getting the lead in the Spiderman picture.

In the meantime, Prinze has three films due out this year. He co-stars with Monica Potter in Head Over Heels. In Vig, he's featured with Lauren Holly and Timothy Hutton.

For an immediate fresh Prinze hit, you can catch Boys And Girls, which opens Friday. Prinze portrays a college kid who tries to cope with his on-off friendship with Jennifer, played by Claire Forlani. Jason Biggs and Heather Donahue co-star.

Prinze considers Boys And Girls the third in the trilogy of college comedies after last year's hit, She's All That and this spring's Down To You.

He says he hopes to graduate to more grown-up stuff soon. Yet he maintains that he has great memories of shooting Boys And Girls in L.A. and San Francisco with She's All That director Robert Iscove, who calls Prinze "the real thing."

"For all his fame and success," says the director, "he's still smart enough to be unsure of himself."

Take the kissing sequence with Forlani, who had a similar sequence with Brad Pitt in Meet Joe Black. "It was a little nerve-wracking," Prinze says. "I mean Claire had done those kinds of scenes with Brad Pitt. I'm like Velveeta Nacho Cheese, and he's like Brie."

Some younger female movie-goers might reverse that order, even after he offers his theory on relationships, which Boys And Girls explores.

"When guys are 15 and girls are 15, guys are more mature, nicer," Prinze says, smiling. "Girls don't want to date a nice guy. They want to date the bad boy."

Bad boys eventually dump the nice girls. Meanwhile, nice guys build their confidence back, and start dating nice girls.

"But the nice girls do it to the nice guys," he continues, "after the bad boys had done it to the nice girls.

"So now, all these nice guys go, 'This sucks. I'm going to be a jerk.' "

Prinze adds: "So as guys get older, we get dumber. We de-mature. We become the jerks. So then as girls become women, they want the nice guys. But now there are no nice guys left, because they've all been played."

That's an odd theory, he's told.

"I'm a guy," Prinze says. "I can't blame my own sex. I'm not stupid."

Maybe a little bit different. "Yeah, when I was growing up," he says of his formative years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, "everyone thought I was on drugs, or gay, or just really strange. I was strange."

Still is? "I hope so," he says.

--AllPop

Freddie's a Prinze of a fellow