The 30-year-old Dallas native—whose pale yet fierce blue eyes and guttersnipe, tomboyish sex appeal have landed her modeling and designing gigs with Victoria’s Secret, Maybelline and Zadig & Voltaire—is just one day away from flying to Los Angeles for a screening of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, an absurd, hyper-violent take on the “great emancipator’s” fictional battle against the undead.

She admits that she had spent the previous night dancing at the Boom Boom Room for the CFDA after party, but she is enjoying a moment of peace before a possible life and career-altering event (in the form of a nation-wide movie opening) takes shape. “I just don’t have a whole lot of that in me anymore,” she claims, referring to the late nights in New York City. “I cannot wait to get on this plane tonight and get to L.A., because I get two-and-a-half days of being just a block away from the beach.”

Her moment in the sun—and in her home in Santa Monica, complete with a half-pipe, vintage cars and a tree house—will be brief. (By the end of that week, Wasson would be shipped out to the Middle East, where she and co-stars Anthony Mackie and Benjamin Walker would screen the film to over 1,800 sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln, the first time a major motion picture held a debut screening for the nation’s armed forces stationed in the Middle East.) “I’ll be living on a boat for about a week in the Middle East, with all the troops and soldiers,” Wasson explains, her sharp elbows resting comfortably on top of the table as she shows off a loose-fitting shirt with a simple axiom: “Keep it Neil.” “‘Keep it Neil,’ aka ‘keep it real,’”she clarifies.

Despite the globetrotting, Wasson has grown accustomed to this nomadic experience. She admits she is incapable of staying in one place for two weeks at a time. “I’m just sort of conditioned to live that kind of life. I have been living that life for so long—I have not been in any one place for more than three months in 12 years,” she says. However, the opportunity to test her stationary skills arrived in early 2011, as she was relaxing on a beach in Melbourne, Australia. She received a phone call from producer Jim Lemley and director Timur Bekmambetov about the role of Vadoma, a “vampire assassin” who has it in for Abraham Lincoln. “We were really looking for kind of a crazy, sexy vampire, and somebody who was visually interesting and had some kind of interesting aura about her,” says Lemley, during a phone call from his office in Los Angeles. Lemley, who lives in France, called agents he knew in Paris, most of them suggesting that he take a look at Wasson. Both he and Timur liked Wasson’s look and almost-effortless intensity (musician Andrew W.K., an old friend of Wasson’s, said she had a “vampiric face").

Lemley dropped her a line.

“I peeled myself off the beach one day and I put myself on tape. Three days later I was doing a Skype with Timur,” she recalls.

One week later Wasson was flown into New Orleans, where the film’s production team took one last look at her before they thrust the new-ish actress (she had a brief cameo in
Sofia Coppola’s 2010 indie film Somewhere) into a $69 million Hollywood film. “It was just an instinct thing—she looked right and had the right attitude, like ‘let’s try it,’” says Lemley.
She was hired on the spot, and had just three weeks to train with an acting coach to learn the basics. Still, Wasson had enough confidence and honest-to-goodness smarts to make up for her lack of professional experience. As Bekmambetov, a Kazakhstan-born director whose command of the English language is still in its infancy, puts it: “Erin is strong and charming. Boys like it.” “I kind of went into it very organically,” she says. “I said ‘well, if I did it the first time from a very personal perspective, and it worked, then moving forward I’m just going to have to create a balance.’ And that very first day when they go ‘okay, let’s shoot,’ you walk on set and all of a sudden you’re not you, you’re Vadoma, and you’re in the 1800s, and you’re telling this goddamn story.”

For three months she was marooned in New Orleans—a foreign experience in a foreign city—living out of the Westin Hotel in the French Quarter in a 12-by-12 box. “When you get off from work at 4:30 a.m. and you’re walking through the French Quarter and there’s a bunch of drunks stumbling around everywhere, it can be a little disenchanting,” she admits. She would spend her off-hours hanging out with local artists, running from gallery openings to music shows and trying “to have an experience inside the experience.” “I’d have these experiences of, like, days where I’d walk on set and we’re re-enacting the civil war, and then I’d go out and I’d be listening to the most bitchin’ jazz music at night.”

After filming finished, Wasson resumed her bicoastal life, shuttling between her home in Santa Monica and her East Village apartment. In Los Angeles, she oversees Low Luv, her jewelry line that she’s designed and managed for five years. “My factories are in L.A., so unbeknownst to most, I’m not just rolling around in the sands of California,” she says.
The Dallas native was thrust into the modeling world when she was 15 years old, winning the 1997 Fashion!Dallas/Kim Dawson Model Search. Wasson would go on to work on campaigns for Armani and Michael Kors, serve as the face of Maybelline and Karl Lagerfeld’s collection for H&M., all the while cultivating a casual yet “sloppy chic” style, which she brought into her styling collaborations with Alexander Wang and cult skate-and-surf brand RVCA.

After her two-year deal with RVCA ended, she moved on to a partnership with French clothing line Zadig & Voltaire. “It’s interesting for me to continue to work with other people in different brands that have different perspectives,” she observes. “You’re dealing with different materials, you’re dealing with different quality, you’re dealing with a different consumer, you’re dealing with a different demographic. All of these things are wonderful challenges for me.”

One such challenge was Santos Party House, a tiny yet raucous night club that aims to bring back the old school New York nightlife experience, with an open space and a “sound system that was totally righteous.” She joined white-jeaned head-banger Andrew W.K. and backers Lucy Ekstrom and Spencer Sweeney to bring the project to fruition. “She’s also super low-key, which is easy to deal with and to work with on a project that is quite intense as anyone could, which I think is probably why she’s so successful,” says W.K.
Wasson’s role is to help “curate the whole experience,” but she admits that the experience has been an education, especially in dealing with large overhead and big expectations for the space.

“It’s New York City, let’s be real. It’s like something’s hot one second, and people don’t give a f­— about it the next,” she adds.
As for the city where she’s lived for the past 12 years, Wasson has reached a certain level of tranquility in her otherwise demanding lifestyle. “There was a time when I was just out because it’s New York, it’s available,” Wasson confesses. “Now I’m like ‘you know, I did it, saw it, bought the t-shirt. I’m going to sit at home and I’m going to clean my house.’ I get off on domestication.”

Wasson does not foresee herself five years from now, age 35, and still grinding it out in New York City. Like the clothing lines, fashion campaigns, blockbuster films and the nightclubs, she’s in it not necessarily to win it, but to feel it. “I think it’s, at the very least, going to be an amazing life experience,” says W.K., of her role as Vadoma. “I imagine she is enjoying it for the experience itself, and not just a thing to do to get somewhere else.”

The end result is not to become Milla Jovovich 2.0, but rather, to try her hand at yet another opportunity that presents itself. “I just want to always know that there’s always going to be another form of creativity for me to get my hands dirty with, and that's why I did a movie,” she concludes. “It wasn’t because I was trying to make some huge proclamation of model turned actress, and I wasn’t about to say ‘I was a model turned designer.’ If anything, I am a curator. I am simply curating my ideas. And if people like them, then f—ing God bless.”