The Strange Allure of Geek Magnetism

"You feel like the beast of humanity is right there in that place," she says.

"The what?"

"The very beast of humanity."

Waititi tells about the Academy Awards ceremony, when his name was read and the camera zoomed in on his face, Waititi pretended to nap. Horsley feigned nudging him awake.

The good people of New Zealand were apparently horrified.

"At home there were people, like, writing to the newspaper, saying, 'He shamed New Zealand, blah-blah-blah-blah,' " Waititi says. "And a) Who knows that we're from New Zealand? Like, nobody in the world knew who this guy was who pretended to be asleep. And b) Who gives a [bleep] anyway? It's just the Oscars."

"Taika loves gags," Horsley says.

When Waititi was accepted into the Sundance Institute's screenwriters and directors labs for the summer of 2005, the couple decided to revive and refine a lonely, insecure character Horsley had portrayed in a play some years before. In "Eagle vs Shark," which opens in Washington Friday, Horsley's character is a cashier at a burger joint who wears ill-fitting pants and sneakers as big as boats. She falls in love with a funny-looking clerk from a video game store who makes ugly candles, and she follows him on his quest to exact revenge on a bully who used to beat him up in school.

Unlike in most ugly-duckling films, Lily is never transformed into a swan. Rather, it's the audience that undergoes a transformation, coming to see her not as a pitiable creature but as strangely, quietly centered. We come to respect the geek. She knows exactly what she wants, and it's the guy who makes ugly candles.

One day when Waititi was at the Sundance lab working on the film, Horsley decided to do one of those weird actor things that you hear about sometimes. She decided to go into a real-life situation in character.

She put on her costume and brushed out her blond curls till they resembled, as she puts it, an "Afghan dog's coat." She affected a slumpy posture and sideways smile and went as Lily to get her eyelashes tinted at a salon in Salt Lake City.

"They were just unbelievably rude, just so rude," Horsley says. "It was absolutely a sense of being invisible."