She surprised fans when she switched from blonde to brunette for "A Walk to Remember," and now Mandy Moore has gone short, trimming her locks to get a fresh look for yet another new movie.

"I'm about to start another film called 'How to Deal' next month," Moore said recently, explaining the hair switch. "This is for the character, for the film itself."

"How to Deal" is a romantic comedy based on a pair of teen novels by Sarah Dessen, a creative writing teacher from North Carolina. The ever-active Moore, fresh off a 2002 MTV Movie Awards win for Breakthrough Performance, Female (see ), began preparations for "How to Deal" shortly after wrapping up another romantic comedy, "Try Seventeen."

"I get to play a really cool, confident, strong teenage girl," Moore said of her "How to Deal" role. "She doesn't believe in love, [she's] kind of cynical. She doesn't believe in love basically because there are all these examples of love gone wrong going on around her, with her parents getting divorced, her best friend falling in love, and they made this pact that they would never fall in love.

"It's actually a really quirky comedy," she said. "[I'm] very excited."

Though she only recently turned 18, Moore is no stranger to quirky comedies (she made a small appearance in 2001's "The Princess Diaries" and provided a voice for "Dr. Dolittle 2") or novel-turned-movie vehicles. "A Walk to Remember," a tearjerker in which the actress offered up an earnest, relatively subdued performance as a morally centered young woman stricken with a terminal illness, was based on a book by Nicholas Sparks.

Moore followed "Walk" with "Try Seventeen," in which she stars opposite Elijah Wood ("The Lord of the Rings") and Franka Potente ("The Bourne Identity") as one third of a complicated love triangle. Wood plays a 17-year-old college student masquerading as an older guy who wins the affections of both girls. "Try Seventeen," now in post-production, is slated for release in 2003.