THEPERFORMANCE

Madeline CARROLL has decided this interview will be conducted on a bed that is way too big for her in a suite at the Four Seasons.

After shaking hands, the tiny 12-year-old plops on a corner of the massive mattress in her sunny orange party dress, propped on her elbows. The girl who says acting “fell in her lap” is generating powerful buzz for her sharp, emotional portrayal of Kevin Costner’s precocious daughter in “Swing Vote.” But even though she can rattle off all the movies she’s seen featuring her famous costars, it didn’t worry her to take on her first major role in the company of Nathan Lane, Stanley Tucci and Dennis Hopper.

“It wasn’t intimidating because I’d heard so many great things about them,” she says. “It was more like, ‘I can’t wait to meet them,’ rather than, ‘Oh, I’m going to be sick.’ ‘Nice to meet you, Kevin . . . ,’ ” she says and then mimics vomiting.

Although Carroll does miss some school for her commercial and film work, and although she is convincing in the movie’s inverted parent-child relationship with Costner, she is emphatically still a kid.

“We play games on the cul-de-sac,” the San Fernando Valley native says of her neighborhood. “The mailbox is first base when we run; the sewer is second. And there’s a green electricity thing that’s third. And then we have a trash can that’s fourth, and then we go back to home. Why are you laughing? It’s awesome! It’s really fun. That’s the same setup we have for kickball and games like that; we don’t play professionally.”

She pops up and sits on the edge of the mattress, her black, fuzzy boots ending about a foot and a half from the floor. Landing her first major role wasn’t easy, she says. After the third callback, “my mom kept on praying that my name would ring in the director’s [Joshua Michael Stern’s] ears. And then I got it, and I started thanking God and everything. Kevin hadn’t even seen me before, and he just signed off on me. We went to a meeting with the director, and he said, ‘It’s so funny, I couldn’t get your name out of my ears.’ ”

Carroll had seen Costner many times and doesn’t hesitate to name her favorite of his films.

“We always knew ‘Waterworld.’ My brothers and I, we would watch it all the time,” she says excitedly. “At Universal Studios, they have an attraction there, and we love to go there. They have Jet Skis and they have explosions and all that stuff; it’s so cool. And they spray you with buckets and everything. It’s awesome.”

Big stars, emotional scenes, a long shooting schedule, driving a truck -- nothing in “Swing Vote” seems to have fazed the young actor.

“It wasn’t really hard because I always had Kevin there,” she says. “He would usually help me out; he would do something funny to add to the scene and then I’d kind of feed off that.”

One of her biggest challenges was stepping up her responsibility level to play Molly, a girl who essentially has to be her own parent: “I’m catered to, because I’m the only girl,” she says of her own family. “I’m not like, ‘Daddy, buy me a pony! I want it now!’ But it was really hard for Molly because she didn’t have a mom and dad to do that.”

The other big adjustment was convincing audiences that Molly was socially and politically active.

“I don’t know a clue about politics. I pay attention to it, I watch the news, but if someone gave me a quiz on it, I’d be like, ‘Say what?’ I’m really bad,” says Carroll.

“I can’t wait to see who wins on this campaign; I just don’t know all the fancy words and everything. But now that I’m going to seventh grade, I’m probably going to learn lots about all that stuff.”

She pauses, then adds, laughing: “So get back to me!”

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Where you’ve seen her

“Swing Vote” is Madeline Carroll’s first major film role. She had small parts in “Resident Evil: Extinction,” “The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause” and “When a Stranger Calls.” She has also appeared in a number of commercials, including spots for Super 8 motels, Mr. Clean and Time Warner Cable.