plays it straight 'Night Listener' actress proves her chops in intense roles

Toni Collette can't talk much about her latest movie, "The Night Listener."

Or rather, she could, but she really shouldn't. And in the interest of preserving the secrecy of key plot elements within the film, we kind of don't want her to.

On the other hand, here's the quite affable Australian actress, 33, with two movies currently in theaters ("Little Miss Sunshine" is the other) and another three that she plans to film by the end of the year.

With a little luck, "The Night Listener" - opening Friday - could end up one of those sleeper buzz flicks that moviegoers could be dissecting and debating for quite some ti me.

"When I watched the movie, I kind of made myself nervous," says Collette, treading carefully. "I think there was something about me that was so freaked out by the character I was playing. I was kind of in denial that I could do this without being affected by it."

Having played tough characters or difficult scenes before - she firs t made her mark in America in the 1994 hit "Muriel's Wedding," for which she gained 40 pounds - Collette says she knows not to take the work home with her.

"I'm not a method actress. I'm pretty easygoing," she says with a laugh. "It's funny how we compartmentalize experiences to get through them."

Asked for a comparable experience, the actress flashes back to her work on the 1998 Australian film "The Boys," which found her playing the girlfriend of a man who participated in a horrific act.

"We all had a really good time. We laughed our way through it," she recalls. "You have to make light of it in order to get through it. Between 'Action!' and 'Cut!' it's all there, but on the sidelines you kind of, I don't know, make light of it just to get through the day."

Based on the novel by Armistead Maupin (who co-wrote the screenplay) and inspired by events that actually happened to the "Tales of the City" author, "The Night Listener" follows a developing friendship - exclusively over the phone - between a radio show writer and a 14-year-old boy dying of AIDS.

Robin Williams plays author Gabriel Noone, Rory Culkin is the kid, Pete, and Collette plays Pete's adoptive mother, Donna Logand, who serves as the frequent go-between for Noone and Pete when the boy is too sick to get on the phone.

Noone is no live-wire role for Williams. If anything, it's Collette's character who gets to play things close to the edge.

"He was very caring and protective of me," Collette says of her co-star. "For a lot of the film, I'm wearing contact lenses, so he's kind of walking me around to make sure I was OK."

More about Logand we won't say. And Collette gets it. When she played Lynn Sear, the mother of the kid who saw dead people in "The Sixth Sense" - the ultimate "don't spoil it" movie - she and the rest of the cast were careful not to upend the psychological house of cards erected by writer/director M. Night Shyamalan.

In that movie, however, Collette's character was somewhat on the periphery of the twist. This time around .. .

No, we won't go any further.

"It's just a really good story, a fascinating psychological labyrinth," says Collette. "To play someone who was so needy and so smart and used it in such a destructive, manipulative kind of way was interesting to me."

Maupin, who had dealings with the woman on whom Logand is based, has high praise for Col lette. "She's such a distinctive actress," he says, "and she knows how to make it just creepy enough, but you still understand her before it's over."

Collette is by no means done with projects containing a certain intensity. In Karen Moncrieff's "The Dead Girl," Collette is among a large ensemble (her scenes are with Piper Laurie and Giovanni Ribisi) arranged into a series of vignettes revolving around - yes - a dead girl. She will also appear in the post-tsunami HBO/BBC TV project "Aftermath," and will play a tightly wound Jewish-Australian mom in the Down Under-shot family film, "Hey, Hey, It's Esther Blueburger" opposite "Whale Rider's" Keisha Castle-Hughes.

When it's suggested that the time might be ripe for an all-out comedy, Collette smiles and proclaims, "There's 'Little Miss Sunshine.'" (The film goes wide Friday.) Uh, yeah. In "Sunshine," Collette plays the matriarchal glue that holds the Hoover family together . .. albeit just barely.

Stacked up next to the failed-motivational-speaker father, the Nietzsche-worshipping son, the horny grandfather, the suicidal gay uncle and the chubby optimistic daughter looking to win a child beauty pageant, Collette's never-say-die Sheryl Hoover is the closest thing the film offers to normalcy.

Funny, yes, but even Collette admits that this comedy is at times a bit grim.

"That movie in itself has so much depth and poignancy and out-and-out broad-stroke comedy, it's between laughing your head off and something quite real and quite dark," she says.