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"I'm a little unnerved," Michelle Monaghan confides. "I don't even know where he came from." She's talking on her cell phone at a Beverly Hills café and sipping an iced tea when she notices a photographer sniping pictures: her first ever run-in with the paparazzi. Conscious of the recent rash of celebrity meltdowns, I try to reassure her as the flashbulb pops. "I guess I should put my clothes back on," she deadpans.

Two things become clear after only a few minutes of the all-American Monaghan. First, the viewing public no longer leaves the 31-year-old in peace. The second: Her charm is as genuine as those bombshell looks. Perhaps she picked it up on her family's farm in Winthrop, Iowa—about as far as you can get from L.A.'s affectation without a passport—but this ex-hayseed is more enchanting than any small-town-girl-in-a-big-city trope a publicist would dream up.

A onetime journalism student, Monaghan modeled to put herself through college and eventually decided her name looked better on a billboard than in a byline ("I couldn't be unbiased or objective"). She moved to New York and, at a pace that would leave your average wannabe waiting tables, turned a few bit parts and the lead in neo-noir Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang into a résumé-making appearance as Tom Cruise's fiancée in Mission: Impossible III. This fall, she hones her dramatic chops in Ben Affleck's heavy-hearted directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, and rescues Ben Stiller from the clutches of his unbalanced bride in The Heartbreak Kid, the latest improv-fueled gross-out from the Farrelly brothers. "It's incredibly daunting when you hear 'Action!' and you still don't have any idea what you're going to do," she says, referring perhaps to one scene involving an intimate performance by a woman and a donkey down Mexico way. ("Who hasn't been to one," Monaghan jokes, presumably.) Still, she wouldn't want it any other way: "What's the point of doing this if you're not going to be challenged? I want to have the fear of God in me."

But her fearlessness seems to come naturally. "She was really feeling the love scenes. I mean…REALLY," her Gone costar Casey Affleck e-mailed me, and she is similarly bold in real-life romance. When Monaghan first met her husband, Australian graphic designer Peter White, in a bar six years ago—"I always told my girlfriends you never meet anybody in a bar"—she was the one who proposed the first date: cheap beers and NFL games down at her local. "He knows nothing about American football, of course, but he put in a really good effort," says the Pittsburgh Steelers fan, apparently absolving her husband of this capital sin. (After she taught him a thing or two, they traded roles: She has just taken up surfing, a must when attached to an Aussie.) Monaghan isn't scared off by heavy machinery either, as her role in the upcoming indie drama Trucker requires her to learn the unsung art of the 18-wheeler. "I just learned how to parallel park it this week," she says.

It's a fitting assignment considering her motor skills. When a wayward driver bellows to her for assistance, Monaghan—a recent L.A. arrival herself—dispenses GPS-grade instructions without hesitation. Is it possible the guy was just looking for an excuse to chat up a celeb? "Come on! I've got 'good sense of direction' written all over me," she retorts, but a comic can never let an opportunity slip away. "I just handed him my phone number, too."

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