LOS ANGELES -- When Kristin Kreuk auditioned for "Snow White: The Fairest of Them All," she didn't believe she would land the title role in the TV movie.

"I didn't think I even had a chance," the 19-year-old actress said in a telephone interview from her hometown of Vancouver.

She didn't have a resume or a headshot to hand to the casting director.

"I had to play the sweetest girl there ever was. ... I didn't know if I could pull it off. Now I'm playing sweet girls everywhere," said Kreuk, who also plays Lana Lang, Clark Kent's secret love, in "Smallville," The WB series about the teen-age Superman (Tuesdays, 8 p.m.).

"Snow White: The Fairest of Them All" will air from 6 to 8 p.m. today on ABC's "The Wonderful World of Disney."

Although the gowns are medieval, the sensibility is modern. This "Snow White" is a fable about a lonely, love-starved princess with a bewitched father, John (Tom Irwin), and an evil seductress stepmom, Queen Elspeth (Miranda Richardson). She seems doomed never to find happiness with her prince, but her own strong will and some dwarfs make for a "happily-ever-after" ending.

'A little tedious'

Kreuk said it "took hours and hours" to create a striking hall of mirrors effect when Snow White responds to the Queen's query, "Who is the fairest of them all?"

"I had to do each individual mirror. So I had to stand, arms outstretched at one mirror, and then do, 'I am, I am,' exactly the same at the next and the next. ... So it took awhile and was a little tedious," she said.

She said filming a scene in which a magic sash floats down from a tree and she has to tie it around her waist -- with frightening results -- also proved difficult.

"I laugh when I see it. I had to pretend I was suffocating. I had never done anything like that and it looks terrible. It cracked me up. That was hard stuff to make look realistic."

"Smallville," which stars Tom Welling as Clark Kent, isn't exactly realism either, but Kreuk, as Lang, usually gets to play "sweet scenes."

However, in an upcoming episode titled, "Nicodemus," the people in the town come under the influence of a strange flower. "I get to have some fun behaving badly," Kreuk said.

Kreuk is happy that "Smallville" is filmed in Vancouver, where she lives with her parents. At the moment, Hollywood holds no special lure.

Discovered in high school where she had acted in some plays, Kreuk has starred for three seasons in the Canadian series "Edgemont," and will make occasional appearances in a fourth season.

She was at first uneasy working on "Edgemont," in which she plays Laurel, a reserved high-school student trying to find her place in a small, close-knit community.

"I had never done anything in front of a camera," Kreuk said. "Shooting 13 pages a day I didn't know what the heck I was doing. It was just really tough on me. Onstage acting had been so much fun in front of an audience."

'A certain sort of strength'

Before landing her roles in "Smallville" and "Snow White," Kreuk wasn't sure she wanted to continue acting. She was considering going to college, and still might, though she said, "I'd want to do it 100 percent, not 50 percent."

"Smallville" executive producer Al Gough said Kreuk "has a certain sort of strength and a sort of haunted quality and there's an accessibility and sweetness as well. If she decides to stick to acting -- and the choice will be entirely hers -- she'll have a long career."