Thora Birch (American Beauty) plays Empress Savina in the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons movie. In an interview with Sci Fi Wire, she said that she was a bit overwhelmed at meeting fans of the Wizards of the Coast role-playing game on which the film is based.

"I've done a few of the conventions, and it's funny. ... Depending on which one you go to, sometimes, like, the real hard-core fans will come, and they're, like, decked out. ... It's trippy," Birch said during a press briefing for the movie, which opens Dec. 8.

Birch added, "You can see that there definitely is a group of people out there who are obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons and anything related. ... This is America [laughs]. ... I haven't had any real, like, freak experiences. ... Sometimes fans will go, like, 'Do you have a boyfriend?' [laughs] ... One time I got a gift, and ... on the little tag, he had put his number down. It was a little creepy. But otherwise, it's all good."

The 18-year-old actress said that she chose to play the part of the doe-eyed empress as a change of pace after her critically acclaimed role in American Beauty.

"This came right after I was finished filming American Beauty, and it was really hard for me to let the character of Jane go," Birch said. "It was very easy for me to sort of stay in that kind of depressed funk I had worked myself into. And the character I play in this ... [is] the most sort of optimistic person on the planet. The main goal of the whole film is to provide a better life for her people. And I wanted something that would kind of snap me out of it and that was extremely different from American Beauty too. I'm not really like that [Jane]."