Avril Flocks to Movies

Avril Lavigne is off to New Mexico, where she will shoot a small role for The Flock, a crime drama starring Richard Gere and Claire Danes.

"I want to do this for a bit of a change," says the twenty-one-year-old Lavigne, about her foray into acting. "I'm going to start off small, see how I like it and make sure I'm comfortable."

Lavigne will have onscreen time with Gere. "He plays a cop who is looking to interview this guy who is my boyfriend," she explains, "and he asks me some questions about him."

Her role is hardly a glamorous one, but she does need to get a makeover for it. "I have glasses and a chipped tooth in the movie," she says, laughing. "I had to get a mold of my mouth [made] so that they could fit the tooth."

Lavigne has lined up two more acting gigs: one in an upcoming project by director Richard Linklater (School of Rock, Dazed and Confused), and another in the animated feature Over the Hedge, in which she lends her voice to a possum named Heather.

"William Shatner plays my dad in it, and Bruce Willis and Gary Shandling are in it. So it's a cool cast," Lavigne says. "These animals are hibernating, and we wake up and there's a hedge -- and we dare to cross it. We get over it and see the real world, and it's really scary for us [laughs]." As for her music career, Lavigne has begun writing songs for her third album. "I'm probably going to go record some of them before Christmas," she says, "but next year is when I'm really going to get going."