Las Vegas native, ‘Camp Rock’ star a doll — literally

Meaghan Martin is one good Nickelodeon appearance away from cornering the market on tweens.

Last summer, the Las Vegas native starred in the musical phenomenon "Camp Rock," the Disney Channel's second-most watched movie ever. And this week, she moves over to ABC Family for her first steady gig, a starring role in "10 Things I Hate About You" (8 p.m. Tuesday).

The series, based on the 1999 Heath Ledger movie that was a loose retelling of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew," is the latest step in a career the 17-year-old knew she wanted from "pretty much the moment I could talk."

Calling on a recent Saturday while she was getting ready for the Los Angeles Film Festival premiere of her movie "Dear Lemon Lima," Martin paints a picture of her early years as the stuff of which showbiz kids are made.

"I used to grab a wooden spoon and stand on my grandma's fireplace and sing to my family, and I'd get really mad if they didn't watch," she says, laughing. "I was quite bossy as a child."

Martin, who was taking dance lessons by 21/2, was a regular in community theater, both with Rainbow Company and Stage Door Entertainment. She's more bubbly than her roles have allowed her to show, so it doesn't sound weird when she says things like, "The stage has been a part of my life since before I can even remember."

She auditioned for the Disney Channel "many, many times," but it was a guest spot on the channel's "The Suite Life of Zack & Cody" that gave her an edge during the casting for "Camp Rock." "Once you've kind of worked for Disney," she says, "you're always in their mind."

In the movie, which solidified the Jonas Brothers' place in the hearts of young girls everywhere and made a star out of Demi Lovato, Martin played Tess Tyler, the camp's reigning diva. Threatened by Lovato's Mitchie, a newcomer to camp, Tess proceeds to make Mitchie's life a living h-e-double-hockey-sticks.

This being Disney, Tess sees the error of her ways by the movie's end, demonstrating the power of both redemption -- Tess isn't inherently bad, you see, she's just damaged from being ignored by her pop star mom -- and marketing -- a nice Tess is better-suited to merchandising. Which brings us to the singing Tess doll.

"It looks nothing like me! That's the weird thing," Martin says, laughing again. "A lot of my friends find it hilarious. Everybody has one. Just the idea of that is kind of strange, that little girls can, like, play with me. It's kind of cool, too, though."

In a reversal of the Betty-Veronica dynamic, Martin usually finds herself playing the mean girl. "I'm convinced it's because I'm blond and right now Hollywood's going through the trend where the blond girls are always mean," she says. "But, actually, on '10 Things,' I'm not mean, I am nice. So I was very excited for that."

Nice, though, is all a matter of perspective. Her Bianca Stratford, newly enrolled in Padua High, is heck-bent on being popular, no matter the cost. She researches the school's most popular girl on Facebook so she can act and dress like her, only to have her sister, Kat (Lindsey Shaw), undo all her hard work by wrecking said popular girl's car in a dispute over a parking space.

"I'm more of just like a ditz on '10 Things,' " Martin says. "I just don't understand that other people have emotions."

And so what if Bianca doesn't know the difference between Kim Jong Il and Long Duk Dong? Seeing as how "Sixteen Candles" came out a good decade before Bianca would have been born, she deserves a pat on the back for even knowing Long Duk Dong.

She may be working for corporate cousin ABC Family, but Martin never strays far from Disney. Her cover of Olivia Newton-John's "Magic" will be on the "Wizards of Waverly Place" soundtrack due out Aug. 4, and her version of "Circle of Life" will be part of the upcoming "Disneymania 7" CD. She'll start filming "Camp Rock 2" at the end of summer. And next month, she'll be one of the young stars featured during a cruise to the Bahamas as part of the Disney Channel Summer at Sea. "To have that be work, it's almost laughable," she says. "Like, I don't even understand how that's my job. But I'm so thankful."

Travel has become a regular part of Martin's life, as she and her mom, Joy, split their time between Vegas and L.A. while her dad, Dr. John Martin, keeps his practice here. The "10 Things" shooting schedule is keeping her away more than ever, but she comes home as often as possible.

"It's really nice to have someplace else to go, because if things are ever getting too crazy and I'm working a lot, I can be like, 'I just need to go to Vegas and be completely normal for a little bit,' " Martin says.

"I'm like the only person who goes to Vegas to be normal."

Christopher Lawrence's Life on the Couch column appears on Sundays. E-mail him at clawrence@reviewjournal.com.