Anna is featured on the cover of the October issue of In New York Magazine.

From In New York:

Like the two vampires who vie for her blood and affection on HBO’s True Blood (2008-present), Anna Paquin is eternally young, at least judging from the way she looks in her new movie, Margaret. That’s because the film—about a 17-year-old New York City high-school girl haunted by the thought that she may have inadvertently caused a fatal accident when an MTA bus hits a pedestrian—was filmed in 2005, shelved due to legal entanglements and recently released.

“I was reaching my expiration date to be plausibly playing a teenager,” says Paquin. “I was a very young-looking 23-year-old at the time. There’s something to be said for casting people who are the age of the person they’re portraying, but sometimes you can bring more to it by having life experience.”

Now 29 years old, Paquin was born Anna Helene Paquin in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, on Jul. 24, 1982, to physical-education teacher Brian Paquin and English teacher Mary Paquin. She grew up in New Zealand, burst onto the scene playing Holly Hunter’s angry daughter in The Piano (1993) and, at 11, became the second youngest person ever to win an Academy Award. Two years later, her parents divorced, and she moved to Los Angeles, where she landed roles in Fly Away Home (1996), Jane Eyre (1996), Hurlyburly (1998) and A Walk on the Moon (1999), among other films.

After high-school graduation, she fulfilled a lifelong dream by moving to New York City and enrolling in Columbia University. “I visited here when I was 12 years old and decided I wanted to live here once I grew up,” she explains. “I went to Columbia and, well, I started doing a lot of theater. Philip Seymour Hoffman was directing an Off-Broadway play and I convinced him to hire me. I really enjoyed the hours and hours of rehearsal, discussing everything about every scene … One thing led to another, and six plays later, I hadn’t really gone back to school. I was getting a different kind of education.” Plus, she was building a résumé that included Off-Broadway plays and hit films, including Almost Famous (2000), X-Men (2000), 25th Hour (2002) and The Squid and the Whale (2005).

“I actually still had an apartment up on the Upper West Side, because I hadn’t quite made the complete commitment to not go back to school,” says Paquin, nostalgically recalling the period of her life when she was a local resident and was cast in the dramatic, filmed-on-location Margaret. “We did a lot of shooting on the Upper West Side and interior filming out in Queens,” she remembers. “I especially loved the East Village and the West Village. I used to say, ‘You’ll have to move my corpse to get me out of New York.’”

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