But Ashley seems energized and downright cheery on the day of her Teen Vogue interview, which is conducted over a breakfast of scrambled eggs and tofu at the Crosby Street Hotel in downtown New York City. She's recently signed a lease on an apartment nearby-she has another in Los Angeles, to which she moved when she was just seventeen-and plans to spend the afternoon scouting couches with her father, a construction-company owner who's flown in from her native Jacksonville, Florida, to help. "Bless his heart," Ashley says. "He's getting the electronics together for me right now because he knows the deals and I know nothing."
The new place, Ashley says, boasts a number of advantages, and the relative proximity to her family is among them. But she seems equally thrilled about the chance to live and work in the city. "I'm very much a girl that likes to have options," she explains. "That's the way I am with fashion, and that's the way I am with my life. In California, I do like to just chill out and go to the beach, but I love the energy here. I feel very productive when I'm in New York."
And being productive, she says, is key to her current definition of happiness. "I'm a bit of a workaholic," Ashley explains. Despite her earnest admission that success in Hollywood does have its downsides, she loves her job. "When I feel like I'm not doing something, it drives me insane," she says. Part of the urgency seems to come from Ashley's sense that she's at a sort of magic moment in her career, on the cusp of the kind of megafame that her costar Kristen Stewart found with the release of the first Twilight film. "This industry never stops," she says. "Right now I'm in this amazing place, and there are open doors. I think it would be foolish to take a month off. So many people would kill to be in my shoes that it's just bad karma!"
Ashley has no fewer than five films slated for release this year, starting with 1983-set coming-of-age story Skateland, which premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival and hits theaters this month. "I play Michelle, who's about to graduate from high school," she says, "and I'm kind of facing the ups and downs of that. I think it's a very relatable film-we have love, loss, and heartbreak." She's even more excited about her turn in the upcoming comedy Butter, in which she appears opposite Jennifer Garner and Olivia Wilde. "It's about butter carving, which, really, you have to Google," she says. "People take these huge chunks of butter, as tall as me, and carve intricate things into them; it's mind-blowing. I'd never heard of it when I read the script, and I remember asking my manager, 'How do writers make this stuff up?' But it actually exists." In the movie, Ashley says, she plays a "typical rebellious teenager who goes from plain vanilla to basically being a stripper. It sounds ridiculous but it's going to be really funny."
She also stars with Demi Moore and Miley Cyrus in the upcoming comedy LOL. "I'm kind of like a bad girl in that film," she says. "It's a really big departure from Alice"-the sweet-natured, clairvoyant vampire she'll play again in November's Breaking Dawn Part I-"and as much as I love that character, I'm excited for people to see a bit of my range." Ashley says she got along surprisingly well with eighteen-year-old Miley. "She's young, but we could relate to each other because she's probably been through as much as a 40-year-old!"
Of course, that's not always a good thing: Just ask Joe Jonas's previous girlfriend Demi Lovato, who checked into rehab after reportedly making threats against Ashley and getting into an altercation with a backup dancer on tour last fall. Their alleged fight is one of the few topics that Ashley's publicist has declared to be completely off-limits. But when asked, in general terms, whether she has sympathy for the difficulties faced by some young, hardworking Disney actors, Ashley says, "Plenty of Disney kids are perfectly normal and love what they do. But you always hear about the people who aren't doing well. It's kind of like the squeaky wheel."
Take Joe himself, for example. At 21, the former child star certainly seems to be doing well. Talk of him, too, was meant to be verboten, but Ashley seems happy to share her happiness. "We have a traveling relationship," she says. "We met through mutual friends in London, which is crazy because we both live in L.A. And we've already met each other's parents, which I think is a good result of the kind of lifestyle we live. He's sweet and really funny, which is huge for me." They've doubtless not been able to see each other as much as they might like, with Ashley shooting the last two Twilight movies, but she says that she likes to spend her limited free time cooking-with him. "I've got this amazing kitchen, and he's getting me into it. It's really nice and almost therapeutic; we put on music and just kind of go into this zone."
Wisely, Ashley is utterly unconcerned about what Joe's lovesick young fans might think of their romance. "There's always going to be anti in this industry," she says brightly. "But the thing is, I have dealt with anti before our relationship, and I will always have to deal with it. There will always be people who love me or hate me. That's why I try to focus on the positive." Growing up in Jacksonville, she recalls, "I just didn't know what I could do. I didn't think that I'd ever wear these amazing clothes, and I didn't think I would be an actress. Now," she says, "I've realized that I can do whatever I want."
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