Halley Feiffer

Age: 22

Currently: Playing Jamie, a spoiled Manhattan private school chick paired by her absentee parents with a nerdy young SAT tutor Adam Green, in None of the Above.

Hometown: New York City. Daughter of celebrated playwright/ screenwriter/cartoonist Jules Feiffer and journalist/stand-up comic Jenny Allen, Halley grew up on the Upper West Side in an oh-so-different family from that of the poor little rich girl she plays onstage. Her bedroom wasn't blindingly pink with padded fabric panels hiding the closet door, for starters. "Oh my god, I'm sitting in my room right now," the bubbly actress says of her childhood apartment. "It's designed to be the maid's room, so it's the size of a shoebox." And Feiffer's real-life parents are anything but absentee: "My mother comes in my room every 20 minutes and tries to get me to eat lunch or drink coffee with her," she says fondly. "I have family around me all the time—sometimes too much so for a college graduate living at home!"

The Acting Bug: At age eight, Feiffer begged to attend the famous Stagedoor Manor summer acting camp in upstate New York and instantly found her niche, starring in plays such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. "I asked my parents if I could get an agent, but they didn't want me to be a child actor," she recalls. "Finally I wore them down, although I didn't get any professional parts until I was 16 or 17." Meanwhile, she jumped from the prestigious Brearley School on the Upper East Side to the equally prestigious Horace Mann School, an educational background similar to that of None of the Above's Jamie. And yet…

Out with the In Crowd: "In high school, I was the opposite of the girl I'm playing," Feiffer says with a laugh. "At first I was worried that I wouldn't be able to warm up to my character because she seems so much like the girls who were mean to me." Far from the sophisticated set portrayed on the TV soap Gossip Girl, Feiffer says, "I had about five friends, and we wouldn't eat in the cafeteria because it was too intimidating. We would get our food and eat it in the theater lobby, almost like vagrants. There was a big social divide at Horace Mann and we were the 'other,' which was fine because we didn't find the kids very interesting or friendly, but it's also sad. When I got to college, it was like, 'Oh, we can all eat in the same cafeteria!'"

College Prep: None of the Above centers on the ultra-competitive world of SAT tutoring, a little-talked-about Manhattan ritual that can cost big bucks—and one that Feiffer avoided, winning admission to Wesleyan University on her own merits, thank you. "I should have had a tutor, because I did not do well on the SAT," she says now. "My reading comprehension was fine, but my math score was as if a monkey took it. My parents offered me a tutor, but I kept saying no." Her writing skills and passion for theater saved the day, and she graduated on schedule last May even after taking a semester off to play the depressive misfit Bee-Bee in Eric Bogosian's subUrbia at Second Stage. "It was a perfect experience," she says of the show's youthful ensemble, "and then I went back to college and realized, 'This is not as much fun as acting in an off-Broadway play.'"

A Family Affair: As the daughter of a Tony voter, Feiffer grew up seeing plenty of theater with her prominent dad, whose writing she praises as "very truthful but also absurd and heightened, which is often how life is." Halley has appeared in the anthology Feiffer's People and played Joan of Arc in a Martha's Vineyard production of her father's Tony-nominated 1976 comedy Knock Knock, "a beautiful play," she says proudly, and one she hopes to perform again. "Both of my parents have been inspirational because they've pursued lots of different interests and encouraged me to do the same," notes Feiffer, who directed plays at Wesleyan and saw her own writing produced at the Young Playwrights' Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Stage and Screen: Feiffer is building her acting resume slowly, mixing small roles in films such as Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale as Jesse Eisenberg's girlfriend and Baumbach's forthcoming Margot at the Wedding as Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh's "sexually inappropriate babysitter" with plays that catch her fancy. She won a rave from The New York Times last summer in the off-Broadway comedy Election Day and will play the down-to-earth daughter in Wendy Wasserstein's Third at Boston's Huntington Theatre in January. "I don't think in terms of the long-term trajectory of my career or my life," she says, adding wryly, "Getting out of the maid's room—that's on my to-do list."