April Cover Star Diane Kruger Talks The Host & Life With Josh

"Really pleasantly terrifying." That's how Stephanie Meyer characterizes Diane Kruger's turn as a parasitic alien with a steely personality in the film adaptation of her first post-Twilight adult novel, The Host. "Diane just can do this icy thing," says Meyer, "but at the same time cover it up with, like, that warm, Oh, how are you?"

Meyer wasn't the only one wowed by Kruger's otherworldly talent in The Host, in theatres March 29th. When the film's screenwriter-director Andrew Niccol first gathered his cast together for a table read last year, one of the key actors was absent. Kruger volunteered to read the part, that of a teenage boy hiding in a cave. Though Niccol knew that she had the right sort of elegant bone structure and air of cool unattainability to pull off her own character—known only as The Seeker—he was surprised that she could be equally convincing as a 14-year-old male. “I was shocked at how versatile she was,” says Niccol of Kruger, whose star ascended with her scene-stealing performance as a German movie star/allied spy in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 Second World War drama, Inglourious Basterds, and whose career has been further bolstered by her red carpet glamour, as well as the fact that she dates Pacey of Dawson’s Creek fame (a.k.a. Joshua Jackson—the man many Canadian women of a certain age grew up wishing would save them from high school).