“You have to see this picture,” Leslie Mann says with a smirk as she taps at her BlackBerry. The shot that pops up shows the actress, best known for comedies such as “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up,” looking model-gorgeous at an awards show earlier this year. Wrapped around her arm is her husband of 12 years, Judd Apatow, who also happens to write and direct some of Mann’s movies, including “Funny People,” which opened last weekend. On the left are friends Ben Stiller and Sacha Baron Cohen, the latter dressed in a leopard-print outfit as his latest character, Bruno. Then there’s the distinguished older gentleman Mann says “insisted” on being in the shot.

“Apparently, Clint Eastwood watches our movies,” she says. “I mean, he’s, like, Dirty Harry! He’s so awesome.”

Mann, 37, suddenly makes a face like she bit into a pickle. “Please don’t write ‘awesome,’ ” she says, taking back her cellphone. Her voice is chirpy as a chipmunk’s, but there’s an anxious Woody Allen edge. “I use ‘awesome’ all the time, but I totally hate the word. Say ‘amazing,’ ‘phenomenal,’ ‘freakin’ insane.’ ”

Honestly, it’s hard to find words to best describe Mann’s good fortune these days. Seated at a cozy corner table at a seaside cafe near her home in Los Angeles, she appears to be a woman who has everything: sleek golden-girl looks; an enduring high-profile relationship; two adorable daughters (Maude, 11, and Iris, 6); a job that lets her collaborate with her husband and get paid to play the cougar, as she did earlier this year in “17 Again,” opposite Zac Efron.

But something in Mann’s apprehensive gaze — or maybe it’s the crick in her neck she keeps referencing (“My acupuncturist determined I’m stressed out,” she says. “Well, hello!”) — suggests there’s more to the picture.

Clearly, Mann is at the zenith of her career. As a charter member of the Apatow comedy collective that launched the movie careers of Steve Carell, Seth Rogen and other professional oddballs, she’s “part of the coolest bunch of funny people since the original “Saturday Night Live” crowd, and yet Leslie always stands out,” says director Robert Rodriguez, who cast Mann as a mom who becomes a conjoined twin (it’s a long story) opposite Jon Cryer in the action-adventure comedy “Shorts,” out Aug. 21. As movie maven Harry Knowles of the film website Ain’t It Cool News says: “Leslie’s like this generation’s answer to Margaret Dumont of the Marx Brothers movies. She looks too ladylike to be funny or like she can’t handle the gross-out humor, but then she hits you with that double-gulp comedic timing that out-sasses everyone she encounters.”

To top it off, “Funny People” is Mann’s meatiest role yet. In the sweet-sad comedy, she plays the “one that got away,” an old flame of a stand-up comic (Adam Sandler) forced to rethink life after he becomes terminally ill. Mann’s character, meanwhile, has to face the music in her unhappy marriage. The performance is “the culmination of everything that Leslie has been working toward in terms of combining serious acting, emotional honesty and laughs,” says Apatow of their fourth project together since meeting on the set of “The Cable Guy” in 1995. “I realize this isn’t objective coming from her husband, but Leslie is doing the best work she’s ever done.”

Why, then, is Mann so quick to dismiss all of the hype? “Yes, OK, so I’ve managed to do pretty well, and things must look great from the outside, but don’t assume I have everything figured out,” she says. Mann blows a strawberry-blond curl away from her face and takes a sip of green tea. “I get as confused about life as everybody, and sometimes I think I’m just hurtling through the world without a plan at all.”

Take motherhood, she says. “The rules are completely different now than when I was a kid, and it’s hard to know what’s right,” she says. Mann, the youngest of six children (including stepsiblings), grew up in California. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother relocated frequently. When she was growing up, parents had more authority than they do now, says Mann, who started acting in commercials at 17.

“But for my kids, it’s totally different. I once told my daughter Maude that I read in this book that when you’re 7, you can start doing chores like vacuuming. She said, ‘Oh, yeah? When I turn 7, I’m gonna vacuum up that book.’ ”

Marriage is another challenge. Mann rolls her eyes talking about her husband’s workaholic tendencies and says their last date night was “let’s see … yeah … 11 years ago.” But she admits she plays a role in their “domestic crazy-making,” as she calls it. “I don’t think I’m easy to live with,” she says. “One day I’ll say life is terrific, but the next I want to change everything and live like my Grandma Sadie. She had this little pink house with a tiny kitchen and one bathroom and shag carpeting, and she and my grandpa would watch the news at 4, listen to the radio and go to sleep. I’d like life to be simpler, but Judd wants to hit me over the head when I talk like that.”

It’s difficult to know whether Mann is being honest or if it’s part of her shtick, but what’s certain is she has found an outlet that suits her slightly acerbic personality perfectly. Recall the unleashed moment in “Knocked Up” in which she tells off a dismissive nightclub bouncer: “You’re a doorman, OK? You’re a doorman, doorman, doorman, doorman. Doorman!”

“There’s something I really enjoy about showing people a side of me that is not acceptable or about playing characters who don’t say the right thing,” Mann says. “Human beings are flawed and wrong and ugly, and that’s OK. Not everybody can be Oprah all the time. Sometimes life sucks — sometimes it’s awesome.”

Mann catches herself and then smiles a perfect smile. “It’s OK,” she says. “You can say I said ‘awesome.’ ”

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.