There's something about misfits, by nature, they're people who look and act (and, yes, dress) differently - which, in our book is a good thing. Even a great thing.

Take Eliza Dushku. The 19-year-old actress stole the show with her wild child antics as Faith, the tough-talking, bad-girl vamp-killer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now she's back as another outside-the-box thinker: Missy, whom Eliza describes as "a total anti-cheerleader" who clashes with the bubbly pom-pom girls in her new school - before joining the squad herself to shake things up - in the new comedy Bring It On. "When they want a nice girl, they hire a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl," says Eliza (who got her dramatic features from her Albanian and Danish ancestry). "I'd like to play the nice girl, the girl next door, but in Bring It On, I'm not. I'm street smart."

This time at least, Eliza has a friend who shares her outsider statue: Jess Bradford (William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet), 21, who plays her brother Cliff. He's on the wrong side of the social order to, but manages to catch the eye of Rancho Carne High's cheer captain, Torrance (Kirsten Dunst). Jesse says he knows what it's like tobe considered a little out there. "I used to wear two different socks to elementary school," he says. "I always wanted to stand out. People would make fun of me. I'd be going, 'I don't care.'"

After Torrance realizes that her beloved cheers were actually stolen from an inner-city hip-hop squad (led by She's All That's Gabrielle Union and the R&B group Blaque), Missy and Cliff help make sure justice is done. If that's what being an outsider is all about - and this is what they look like - then may we all aspire to be misfits.

Reprinted from Teen People - September 2000