“I’m five foot three. I don’t look like a lot of other people, you know what I mean? I look like I’m 12,” says Lea, who’s wearing a cream top she found at Anthropologie the day before and matching shorts. (Those sunglasses are from Urban Outfitters. “I’m not a big spender.”) She gets called out for her unconventional features all the time, but Lea doesn’t let it bother her; if anything, she’s used to it. “How many manag- ers told me, ‘Get a nose job. You’re not pretty enough’? But I proved them wrong.” There’s Fanny Brice for you.
Now she admires the popular girls in Hollywood: Penélope Cruz (who Lea thought wouldn’t recognize her but who countered, “Do you think I don’t have a TV?”), Blake Lively, Jennifer Aniston (especially for posing as Streisand in Bazaar: “It was awesome; I really wanted to do that”), and her sometime costar Gwyneth Paltrow, who “never gets it wrong.”
“I am obsessed with Gwyneth Paltrow,” Lea says. The day they met, they were rehearsing a Chicago routine for Glee. “I was nervous and said, ‘I don’t think I can do that dance move.’ She said, ‘You can do it.’ She wasn’t afraid of anything. I love talking with Gwyneth. She just gives good advice. She said, ‘Don’t ever read anything about you.’”
