Australian Sheridan Jones was finishing up her work as a publicist at a London fashion company and pondering what 1999 might hold. Her reverie was interrupted by a phone call from Director Danny Boyle, who was in Thailand with Leonardo DiCaprio filming The Beach.

He said to me, "This is probably the strangest phone call you'll ever get." Maybe, but it was her kind of strange. Boyle explained to Jones that he had a casting crises: he needed a young woman to play an Australian backpacker in his film - fast. Costumier Rachel Flemming had recommended her old friend Jones, so Boyle rang the 32-year old Gold Coast local and asked her to do an impromptu audition down the phone line incorporating some "broad Aussie slang." Then Boyle (who made his name directing Transpotting), "asked me what I looked like," recalls Jones. He must have been satisfied with her answer because "he invited me to come out and join them."

Nine days later, Jones, whose acting experience is limited to a two-year diploma at Kelvin Grove College for Performing Arts in Brisbane and a couple of ads in London, was on Phi Phi Leh Island. She had landed the small part of Sandy, a twentysomething backpacker ("Leo's wallpaper," she quips) who spends her days on the island catching fish for a self-sufficient community. "I was told to get a tan and get into shape," she says." We had to work out twice a day and it was pretty hard work. I was part of the fishing detail and my job was to learn how to use a net while the men speared the fish." "We spoke to Leo a fair amount on the set but it was pretty businesslike," says Australian Sheridan Jones (back in London) As the film is set on a beach, there was plenty of play, too. "Leo invited us to two parties. The first was on a yacht as a kind of a 'Welcome to The Beach', and then just before I left, he threw a massive party at the top hotel in Phuket. He was really nice to all of us but he had his own friends there as well to hang out with." So, no chance of hooking up with the 24-year old star now that the film has finished? "Leo was really cute-looking," she sighs. "But I didn't manage to catch his eye. That remains the stuff of my dreams." Besides, she adds with a laugh, "He goes for them a bit younger than me. I'm a granny by his standards. "