"Edgy" isn't the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Amy Brenneman. With her curly hair and rounded features, the actress looks like the girl next door type. Sometimes she'll play it tough or serious for a drama. But you would never guess from the parts she usually takes that she is actually hysterical, unaffected, and-- without any question at all--the most fun I have ever had during an interview.

Brenneman leads the ensemble cast of The Jane Austen Book Club, writer/director Robin Swicord's (Memoirs of a Geisha, Practical Magic) adaptation of the novel by Karen Joy Fowler. She plays Sylvia, a forty-something Sacramento wife and mother who suddenly finds herself single after he husband (Jimmy Smits) announces he's leaving her out of the blue. Her friend, Bernadette (Kathy Baker), lures her into joining her new book club devoted strictly to Jane Austen novels to help alleviate her understandable, but deep, funk.

Due to some last minute schedule changes and predictable LA traffic, I was a bit frantic when I headed over to the Beverly Wilshire to talk to her. But within seconds of our introduction, Brenneman and I were laughing hysterically at each other. We were also virtually incapable of staying on topic.

"I get really chatty," she explains. "My husband lives in fear of that. And I would never say anything bad about anyone I work with. It's more like inappropriate details about our life at home."

When doing an interview with a particular celebrity magazine, "my publicist was like, 'Whatever you say, they'll send you a s--tload of it,'" she tells me. "Then the [reporter] goes, 'What's your favorite feature of yourself?' And I said, 'My spirit.' And she said, 'No no no--like your boobs or your ass.' And I said, 'Oh...My smile?' She's like, 'Well, I can work with that. It's not as good as my ass cheek.'" She giggles in embarassment. I was trying to be a little soulful about it."

Although The Jane Austen Book Club is about, well, a book club, Brenneman has never been in one herself. But she does have a group of female friends that gets together. "I have always liked the summer solstice and the equinox. I always like events that have something to do with the earth and are not made up," she says. "A year ago, summer solstice, I got this group of women together and it really has taken off. It's a very groovy group of girls and it really becomes something you can count on. I think that's the other thing in a big city where everyone lives so far away, we know every three months we're going to do that."

When I make the obvious joke about her equinox-inspired gatherings being a coven, Brenneman tells me how a reporter believed her when she made that same joke about herself at the Toronto Film Festival. "I said something about this group and I said, 'Like, oh you know, we're a group of witches.' And he said really sweetly, 'So do you use your celebrity to further the cause of things you care about?' And I was like, 'Oh my God, he thinks... I'm not actually a witch!'"

But when she and I discover we're both in the throes of reading Barbara Kingsolver's memoir about her year of living on an organic farm, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, our interview turns into a little book club of our own. Although both of us petered out at about the same part in the book, we agreed it still had its merits. "I got into the slow food thing. She did inspire me. I go to the farmer's market," she says.

"I am a foodie my mind. I am such an actress. I'm like, I will make slow, bubbly stews for my children...Or just have the nanny do it because I need to go to aerobics."

For her next movie, Downloading Nancy, Brenneman reteams with Maria Bello, with whom she costars in The Jane Austen Book Club. "We adore each other," she says of Bello. "She was reading the script, Downloading Nancy, on the set of our movie and she was like, 'This is really f---ed up. I've got to do it.'"

Brenneman describes Downloading Nancy as "Dark, dark, dark dark dark. It's [Bello] and Jason Patric. And she plays this woman who's having a hard time and she goes online to find a guy to kill her. And I play her quite unsuccessful psychiatrist."

"I came in at the very end of the shoot. I've done this one other time where you're literally the last three or four days of the shoot and it's been really intense. It's kind of like walking into this party. And you're like, 'Hi, I come from normal world.' And everyone is basically, like, peaking on their drugs."

When it comes to The Jane Austen Book Club goes, Brenneman was very impressed with the work that Swicord did in adapting it for film. "It's honestly six short stories. You have the six characters. It's sort of like a character study using the novel they've chosen," she says. "Robin had to figure out a beginning, middle, and end, the forward structure. She had to do a lot of work. The book was not set up to be a movie. She's pretty geniusy."

And what does she want you to know about the movie? "I want you to know that it's funny and smart and irreverent," she says. Much, Ms. Brenneman, like you.

The Jane Austen Book Club opens this weekend in limited release.

Click on ReelzChannel.com's The Jane Austen Book Club page for clips from the movie and more!