Internet actress Jessica Rose misses New Zealand.
The 19-year-old New Zealand actress revealed as mystery girl Bree and known to millions of people on the internet as Lonelygirl15 once worked as a makeup artist on Peter Jackson's movie King Kong.
Speaking exclusively to the Herald on Sunday from her Los Angeles apartment, stunning New York Film Academy
graduate Jessica Rose, 19, said yesterday she longed for the home comforts of New Zealand.
"I just wish I could do what I am doing here from New Zealand," she said. And she revealed life had changed dramatically after she was unmasked as the face behind an international video diary phenomenon.
Rose, who went to school in Mt Maunganui and took acting classes in Auckland, left New Zealand in May last year to pursue an acting career.
She attended an audition for an "independent project" in Beverly Hills. "I just sort of assumed it was going to be a movie... I went in for my audition and there was a webcam for the auditioning camera... they had me read a blog thing and I just thought that was part of the movie.
"When I got the part and they told me what the project was about I was a bit hesitant."
Improvising as Bree, a 16-year-old home-schooled teenager who diarised her life on the internet was a sought-after role. Eighty people auditioned.
Web surfers were fooled into thinking the posts were innocent, unscripted tales from the bedroom of a pubescent schoolgirl.
But last week internet geeks outed Bree and a media flurry erupted.
Amateur sleuths unearthed clues and stories appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and other publications forcing the three creators of the videos to confess.
But Rose doesn't consider her loosely-scripted webcast monologues as fake. "It is like stopping in the middle of Shortland Street and saying 'hey guys, just want to let you know what my real name is...' It wouldn't be quite as entertaining."
The bedroom of the male director was converted into a girl's bedroom to film the low-budget reality series.
"We are just trying to entertain really, we didn't set out to hook people or trick people," Rose said. "We just wanted to create a new medium and by doing so we had to create this little world of our own and by keeping it under wraps we could do this."
Watch Jessica Rose's diaries on YouTube.
