What's in the card for Katie Holmes?
After a couple of forgettable teen flicks, the 21-year old star of Dawson's Creek takes a seat at the grown-ups table with supporting roles in Wonder Boys and the new thriller, The Gift.

Written by Ray Rogers

It all starts with a vision. A slow-motion pan down Katie Holmes's long, alabaster leg as it transforms from a detonator of teenage testosterone into a bruised piece of cadaverous flesh immeresed in sludgy water. In next month's nail biter, The Gift, a movie so scary it may outspook Blair Witch 2, Holmes plays a hussy of a Savannah society girl who asks psychic Cate Blanchett if a happy future is in store for her and her fiance, played by Greg Kinnear. And this is the image Blanchett's psychic is overcome with.

atie Holmes, Dawson's Creek star and budding screen starlet, doesn't take much stock in all that--psychic abilities, ESP, telekinesis. Although she's not opposed to the idea of an old soul or people with intuitive natures, she's a good Catholic girl from Toledo, Ohio, who turns to her family for advice, not to a fortune teller. Nevertheless, she gamely agrees to come along for a jaunt to an East Village witchcraft shop, Other Worldly Waxes, for a personalized tarot reading in anticipation fo the release of The Gift.

Our reader, Yasmine--blonde and wise like Blanchette, buy not quite so self-serious as Blanchett's character; originally from L.A. and so over that scene--also has a premonition. On the day of our scheduled appointment she rings my cell phone: "Were you trying to reach me? I had a feeling you were." I had left a message a half hour before on the number given to me by Other Worldy Waxes, and was en route to the shop to track her down an let her know Katie and I would be late--the photo shoot was running over. It turns out they had given me a disconnected beeper number and she never received the message. She just knew to call me. Spooky.

Several hours of posing and vamping for the camera pass as Holmes's selections of Macy Gray and vintage U2 blare out of the stereo. Then we trek across town for the reading. Yasmine is swinging a pendulum over the cards. She places a large Herkimer diamond--given to her by a shaman--on the table. Over a round of double skim lattes, Katie, working a wholesome but sexy look in a pure white pullover sweater and tight faded jeans, chooses 10 cards with her left hand, concentrating on what the next three months will bring for her. In the process she also picks one card and hastily puts it back--a no-no. "I'm sure it'll pop out and let itself be known," reassures Yasmine.

According to Yasmine, the years 2002 and 2006 will be biggies for Holmes. The former being a time of great career opportunities, the latter a time of a different kind of growth: motherhood. "I don't wanna be a mother at 27!" Holmes protests. It strikes me as funny to think of her as a mother, as right now the people surrounding her have a tendency to baby the actress. Her publicist tells me more than once to go easy on her--she's only 21. And don't harp on the bare-breasts scene she did in the The Gift--she's only 21. And she's sort of freaked by the idea of the tarot reading, so her friend Albert is going to tag along for moral support--she is only 21.

Maybe that's just the curse of playing a 17 year-old on TV, aof having slightly baby faced cheeks, and being genuinely sweet, nice, and soft-spoken. And to be fair, Holmes calls herself "naive" even after five years in the business, and admits to surrounding herself with people who protect her. But make no mistake, Katie Holmes is no pushover. When our psychic brings up the question of a boyfriend, Katie grabs the tape recorder, shuts it off, and puts it by her side until the answer is given. Later on she'll try to broker a deal with me: She'll keep on talking to me rather than sneak off to see Almost Famous with Albert if I don't print anything about her relationship with hunky American Pie and Election star Chris Klein in the story. When I tell her I can't comply, she's outta there within 15 minutes.

She knows what she wants and she's not afraid of taking charge--or is at least becoming less so. In the past year, she's made some bold career moves. For starters, she parted ways with her original manager, the man who landed Holmes her first film role, in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, and took her from star of Toledo high-school plays like Damm Yankees and brought ther face to millions of television screens as the heroine of Dawson's Creek. (Let it be noted that from the start, she's had moxie: She famously blew off her first audition for Dawson's creator Kevin Williamson because it was scheduled for the same day as Damm Yankees' opening night, and she wouldn't dream of letting her friends down.)

As with many young actors' careers, a strike-while-the iron's-hot mentality found Holmes filming three teen movies in quick succession, with starring roles in Disturbing Behavoir, Teaching Mrs. Tingle, with Helen Mirren, and Doug Liman's terrific raver odyssey Go. "I was way in over my head; and I approached everything with such naivete," Holmes reflects on ther first feature-film roles. "They were great opportunities, and I had a wonderful time doing those teen movies, but it was kind of time to not do that anymore."

Understandably, she got sick of playing teenagers. "I mean, I'm getting older, you don't really wanna do that on vacation. And I was fortunate enough to have opportunities to work with people like Michael Douglas and Robert Downey Jr., who, you know, I would cry if I saw them in a restaurant. I wouldn't be able to walk up and ask for an autograph." She is only 21, remember.

And how did she do in said company? In certain scenes she steals the show. Oscar-winning director Curtis Hanson, who cast Holmes in Wonder Boys with Douglas and Downey, praises the actress's performance in a key scene in which her character, a college student named Hannah Green who's got an unrequited crush on her professor (Michael Douglas), critiques the professor's novel: "She's got over a page of dialogue, and it's all her. Michael just listens and reacts. And as she critiques his book, she's also critiquing his life. And she's nervous, insightful, brave, vulnerable, and ultimately disappointed. And I can't think of an actress who could've done that scene better."

Instead of cashing in on more throwaway teen flicks, Holmes smartly opted for smaller, but pivotal roles in meatier films with stellar casts and directors--even when her handlers were against it. Case in point: Holmes's cherished role as Hannah Green was initaially turned down. Hanson recalls "Katie flew up to New York and stood in line in the hotel corridor on a day when I was seeing actors and actresses every 15 minutes. And she read for the part. I know that she actually did this against the advice of her advisors. Going through the normal channels, which our casting director did, in essence the job was passed on. But word got to Katie directly. And she made up her own mind. She was hotter than hot off that TV show, and so often young actors get a taste of success and immediately start second-guessing everything, and their managers and agents do. And it's all about, Oh, you can't read for this, or the movie's not built around this... Katie just approached it as an actor--and a very serious one."

When I ask what happened with her manager, Holmes will only say, politely and quietly, but firmly, "I had a manager and now I don't. It was just time to move on." (In a follow up interview the next week, Holmes elaborates just a bit, saying, "My manager did a heck of a job with me. He got me where I am. It was hard for the both of us. It was kind of like breaking up with somebody.") While she won't go into specifics about her manager or any of her dealings, she does hint at the awakening process: "At first, you are just so excited. I was just like, everyone seems so nice, and the producers are great. And then you start to figure out how it all works."

Her fellow cast member James Van Der Beek, who plays her ex-boyfriend and longtime childhood pal Dawson Leery on the show, witnessed that transition first hand. "You always hear people say, 'You know what I like about so and so? They haven't changed a bit.' That always rubs me the wrong way," he says, speaking from his Dawson's Creek digs in Wilmington, N.C., where the new season is currently being shot. "Because you know, [in Holmes's case] you start out in high school, you send out a tape from your basement in Toledo, and then all of a sudden you're surrounded by all these people in your life who stand to make a huge profit off of you. You definitely have to change a little bit: You have to grow up and get a little more savvy. I think that Midwestern sweetness will always be a part of Katie. So it's probably a struggle sometimes as to what's the most professional thing to do, and what's the best thing to do for her. And I think she's also very concerned about how other people are feeling."

Holmes has a question for Yasmine: Any big news in her career in six months' time? She elaborates in a whisper. She won't admit it to me, but she is asking if Dawson's Creek will run its course this year. Holmes has come a long way since her first day of work on the series back in 1998, professionally and personally. And the time hasn't passed without some growing pains. Over the years, the core cast has become like family, in the sense that, as much as you love your family, you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your family. You're stuck with them. She became romantically linked with co-star Josh Jackson, who plays Pacey on the show, which proved trying when they broke up. "I was 19 years old and he was 20 years old, so it wasn't easy right away. But it's another part of growing up. And I'm glad that we work together, and even now we're good friends and we make fun of each other." She laughs. "No, don't print that because I do love everybody, but it's funny because we get on each other's nerves, and we joke about it, and we tell each other."

On the set, Holmes plays the same role she does back home in Toledo--the baby. She's fifth out of five kids, and she admits that it's just part of her personality to pester and stir things up. When Holmes began her reign as WB queen Joey Potter, she was fresh out of high school herself, and was able to relate to her character intrinsically. "I'm playing who I was when I was in high school; I mean, that was me. Well...no, erase that. It's so weird, because you do it every day and sometimes it feels like you're just that person all the time. God, I'm rambling, maybe too much coffee."

Returning this year was particularly difficult, as the gap between the 21-year-old Katie and 17-year-old Joey has widened considerably. "A lot of times you'll read the script and think, This is ridiculous, why would you ever react this way? You have to work harder to remember those feelings, because at that age you probably would act that way. But not after the experiences that we've had in the last four years."

Is it time to graduate? "Its weird, because it is like we went to high school again, in a way. So playing seniors, you kind of get the sense that we should be wrapping this up. It feels like it is time."

So, then, what's in the cards for Katie Holmes next? Since we've paid Yasmine good money for her time, we'll let her answer. "It looks like you've been going through some big changes, maybe feeling like there's more things that you want ot learn about yourself, your spirituality, or about being a woman. There's some kind of event that will prompt you toward that. Like, maybe you have a strong female role model that you're looking at, or someone that has influenced you a lot is coming out in your work right now."

Enter Jessica King, her character in The Gift. Playing the role of the bad girl, "the girl that every guy secretly wants," as Holmes calls her, took the actress to a place she'd never been before. "That wasn't the character that I was initially drawn to at all. The thought of doing that scared me. It's really different from anything that I've ever done, and who I am, and that's what kind of made it so exciting and challenging. She's someone who is so unapologetic for who she is, and what she does, and so strong. I had a scene where my fiance [Greg Kinnear] accuses me of having an affair, and I didn't apologize--that was pretty wild. You would think that someone would just die inside, and she didn't. She was very proud of what she did, and very strong. I'm definitely not as strong as her. I don't wish that I conducted myself in the way that she does, but a little sass never hurt anyone. I am so reserved, and I usually just repress it, so it was really fun to get a lot of that out. I guess I used some anger."

Sarah Michelle Gellar, star of TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, met Holmes more than five years ago--before Dawson's Creek, before Buffy--and knows as well as anybody how different this Jessica King is from Holmes. "She'll play that character in a film, but she's not gonna go pose nude on a magazine cover to scream, 'Hey, I'm Sexy!' She's proud of who she is and knows that a lot of girls and women look up ot her. She has a sweet, wholesome image, and thats who she is. She's not trying to shatter that image."

While Gellar has a point--Holmes is very much a refreshingly down to earth kind of gal--she did slip out of her designer duds to pose in nothing but an Hermes blanket at the shoot for this story. If a decision like this suggests Holmes is outgrowing her PG phase and veering into R-rated territory, it's right in time with Holmes's blossoming thespian skills. On the set of The Gift, director Sam Raimi was astounded by her acting ability. "She had a very smart take on the character," Raimi says, "because the character as written is manipulative, she likes to take possession of conversations, and she's a user of people. Kattie was smart enough not to play that, but simply to be that, and be very subtle in how she expressed those qualities of the character. Then, when she turns on Greg Kinnear, and lets loose, you think, Oh my God, that's who you really are, and Greg Kinnear sees that for the first time, too truly what type of woman he's become involved with. She's got a lot of fire in her when she wants." Katie's response to Raimi's suggestion that she enhanced her scenes, brought nuance to the character that wasn't on the page already? "He was probably just being nice."

As for that dreaded bare-breasts scene in the film, Holmes still worries what her folks will think. (She is only 21, after all.) "I hope that they will respect my decision. It was just weird to play somebody who first of all does sleep around, and somehow is okay with that. I think that was harder than getting physically hurt--I'm not gonna lie. It felt very real. I got thrown up against the car and had bruises, and then flew and saw my boyfriend." She laughs. "Take care of me! I'm hurt!"

Our psychic friend has picked up on Holmes's budding romance with Klein. "There's something that you've worked hard at, and had a lot of patience about, that will be coming a little bit more into fruition," says Yasmine. "It does seem like someone with a romantic connection to you. Do you have any water-sign men around you? The tape is turned off. She is encouraged to go for it, not back away from it. "You're a fire sign, you've got fieriness going. Don't get shy or introverted about it. Don't fight it, just go with the flow. A few months down the line, things get really serious with him. There might even be a proposal."

Holmes get a bit exasperated when she finally does talk about boyfriend. "It's not like it's a big secret," she says, "it's just really important to me, so I like keep it to myself. It's definitely an amazing part of my life, and I'm very proud to be a part of his life." She then throws her hands in the air, wobbles her head around, and articulates with her best Valley Girl elocution: 'I think he's really cute, and a really good actor, and hot.' So you're gonna put that in there? I think he's hot."

And, at last, here comes her fieriness: "Just don't mess with me! All right, next question, mister."