But she’s nowhere near the level of fame she rose to a little over a decade ago. After performannces in 1999’s “She’s All That” and 2001’s “Josie and the Pussycats,” she had a yearlong fling with People magazine’s future choice for Sexiest Man Alive, Ryan Reynolds.
But Cook quickly decided she didn’t want to be the next Julia Roberts. She preferred to follow the path of her “Pussycats” co-star Parker Posey, an actress who continually straddles the line between commercial and independent film.
For a while, Cook was banging out four movies a year, joking that she preferred working on small-budget projects, if only because the terrible catering service helped keep her weight in check. But when indies took a financial hit, Cook discovered that studios considered her as dated as Carole Lombard.
“You’re not really on their radar anymore,” said Cook, whose last studio film was 2007’s “Nancy Drew.” “I can step outside of myself and sort of see why people think I disappeared for 10 years. I did, by their perception, and I’m totally fine with that.”
But she surprised herself by signing up for “Perception,” a series about neurology professor Daniel Pierce (Eric McCormack), who helps the FBI solve a new crime every week, at least when he’s not hallucinating characters and paranoid scenarios, much in the way Russell Crowe did in “A Beautiful Mind.”
In “Perception,” she’s Kate Moretti, an FBI agent who’s demoted because she cares too much about her cases. Oh, and she also has a daredevil streak that compels her to leap two stories off a fire escape to pounce on a fleeing suspect.
