ome physics majors at England's University of Essex made headlines recently when they created the website britneyspears.ac - in which a virtual "Britney" explains quantum theory, photonic crystals and lasers. Clearly they were ahead of the curve. Spears makes her movie debut this month, and she's playing a "brainer." Crossroads tells the tale of three girls - a cheerleader, a straight-A student and a "burnout" - who take a graduation roadtrip in defiance of their parents. Though Spears would have been an obvious choice to play the cheerleader, she plays Lucy, the honor student.   "She's a dorky girl," Spears says of Lucy, her first non-Britney screen character. "I don't have much makeup on, and I'm not really glamorous. Making
the movie, honestly, was probably one of the things I'm most proud of that I've done so far," Spears said at a press conference in Toronto.   "I came up with the concept for the movie a year ago. I saw the rough cut two weeks ago and it's just really special. The movie is really heartfelt, it's just a chick movie. You want to just watch it with your girlfriends."   That much has been obvious for a while. She first became known as a Mouseketeer (alongside longtime crush and current boyfriend Justin Timberlake of 'NSYNC) singing, dancing and acting in skits in The Mickey Mouse Club. And even as she's sold millions of copies of her albums ...Baby One More Time, Oops... I Did It Again and the current Britney, the core of her appeal has been visual, with multimillion dollar videos/ad campaigns (like the one for Pepsi that has played in Canadian theaters for the past several months).   The acting bug has influenced Spears to recently start her own production company and hire screenwriter James V. Hart (Contact) to write another upcoming project especially for her. She reportedly has cameos in the next Austin Powers sequel, Goldmember, and the musical Chicago (which is filming in Toronto).   Meanwhile, her boyfriend Timberlake and his bandmates had hoped to make Spears' debut a revamp of Olivia Newton John's role in Grease. "In the version we were working on, ('NSYNC members) were going to play the T-Birds and Britney was going to play the female lead (Sandy)," says 'NSYNC's Lance Bass. The project was eventually spiked over a dispute over rights.   Spears almost made her debut in Scary Movie, agreeing to a role but then bowing out over concert tour commitments. Instead, Spears went with Crossroads, which "is not this huge Hollywood movie," she says. "For me it was a personal thing. It was very family oriented. It's just really real."   Directed by teen comedy specialist Tamra Davis (Billy Madison) and co-starring Dan Aykroyd and Sex And The City's Kim Cattrall as Lucy's parents, Crossroads introduces fans to a mousier Britney, but not an unrecognizable one.   For one thing, she still sings (there's a karaoke scene where she belts out Joan Jett's "I Love Rock 'N' Roll", which not incidentally is a cut on her latest album). Spears and her girlfriends also sing along to a car radio playing, ironically enough, the 'NSYNC hit "Bye Bye Bye."   And there's still the central issue of Britney/Lucy dealing with her sexuality. The singer, who has been forthright about wanting to remain a virgin until marriage (though she now shares a house, ostensibly platonically, with Timberlake) hints that her character "loses it" in a steamy love scene. "I was shocked when I was watching it because it was very realistic," she says. The scene is reflective of Spears' entire career, which has undergone growing pains of late with the singer's attempts to mature and vamp onstage and in-studio (case in point: the video for "I'm A Slave 4 U" featuring Spears wearing a thong over leather pants).   She was born in Kentwood, LA to Lynne and Jamie Spears, a schoolteacher and a building contractor. The child singer and actress first tried out for The Mickey Mouse Club at age 8, but was rejected as too young. Still, the impressed producers set her up in dance school in New York and hired her as a full-fledged Mouseketeer after she had some commercials, stage work and a winning appearance on Star Search under her belt. Spears joined a Mickey Mouse cast that also gave the world Christina Aguilera and 'NSYNCers J.C. Chasez and Justin Timberlake. Of her early crush on Timberlake, she said "We were, like, 12 or 13 and it was, like, 'Hi, do you like me?' It was like puppy love."   The real break came with Spears' signing in her late teens with Zomba Records, the sometime label of Backstreet Boys and 'NSYNC. ...Baby One More Time sold 13 million copies. And with the heat came an intense media focus on her sexuality - tabloid reports that she had breast implants (which she denies), parent groups like the American Family Association blasting her for posing for Rolling Stone in her underwear ("Just because I look sexy on the cover of Rolling Stone doesn't mean I'm naughty," she said.)   Maturing under a media microscope, she's sensitive to suggestions that she's leaving behind her core audience of teen-and-preteen girls with suggestive songs like "I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman." "It's up to parents to supervise what kids are ready to hear," she says. And in a promotional appearance for a recent concert TV special, she promised that her work would become "shocking and edgier ... I want to do things that people have never seen before. I don't want to be considered a role model."   If not shocked, people will at least be taken off guard by her acting chops, says Justin Long of TV's Ed, who plays one of the two male leads in Crossroads. "I think she's going to surprise a lot of people with her acting ability. I was certainly surprised."   Says Spears: "I want the people who go to see it just to see that it's heartfelt and just to have a good feeling inside when they leave. That's all I can pray for." - Jim Slotek