LOS ANGELES – What happens when a Gilmore Girl takes a walk on the wild side? In the case of 23-year-old Alexis Bledel, who has played Rory Gilmore for five seasons on the WB series Gilmore Girls, she dresses in goth black and prowls the streets of Sin City, opening Friday. Bledel’s Becky is the junior member of a gang of tough-as-nails prostitutes in the dark and deadly town. It’s unlikely that anyone would ever confuse Becky with Rory the Yalie. “I sure hope not,” says Bledel. “But because TV is such a pervasive medium, and because people will always correlate me with the character Rory, I’m sure some people will try to draw comparisons.” Sin City is the comic book creation of author-artist Frank Miller. He co-directed the movie with Robert Rodriguez, best known for Desperado and the Spy Kids films. Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke and Clive Owen play the hard-boiled heroes, while Bledel’s elaborately costumed fellow hookers are played by Jaime King, Devon Aoki and Rosario Dawson as their leader, Gail. Jessica Alba of Dark Angel plays a stripper. “Becky is the only character who really has a backstory,” says Miller. “She’s ashamed of what she does and wants to keep it a secret from her mother.” One thing audiences will certainly notice in Sin City – shot mostly in stark, high-contrast black and white – is Becky’s eye color. “When I saw Alexis’ eyes, there was no way I could not make them a part of the character and the movie,” says Rodriguez. “I had to have that piercing blue in the film.” The hookers manage their own business, keeping both the authorities and the exploiters outside their borders. Until Becky. “She’s an interesting character because she’s in the world of Sin City but she’s not fully embracing the fact that she lives there,” says Bledel. “She’s part of the whole operation, but she gets grossed out by the blood and the stuff that she sees.” So Becky turns traitor. “She’s looking for a way out, and she’s much more out for herself and so she betrays everyone,” she says. Hardly a Rory Gilmore move, though she, too, is growing up. “In some ways the character of Rory on the show is so perfect that it was almost annoying, she was seemingly without flaws,” she says. “But this year they’ve changed the story line quite a bit, and you got to see her a little differently. For one thing, she got together with her first boyfriend who was at that time married to someone else. So she had this affair with a married man essentially, and you finally started seeing this other side to her.” Bledel grew up in Houston. Her Argentinean father was a builder and writer, and her mother grew up in Mexico, which is why Bledel learned Spanish as her first language. At 14, she began to spend summers in Manhattan working as a model, living in a Greenwich Village apartment with a number of male and female models. “It was like [MTV's] ‘The Real World’ in some ways, but with less drama,” says Bledel. “Because I was so young, my mom was there with me and was taking care of everybody.” Eventually she enrolled at NYU to study film. “I guess I wanted to be a writer-director like everybody else, with an emphasis on the writing. … I got through a year of school before I was cast in Gilmore Girls, which meant moving to Los Angeles. That was the real culture shock for me. But I’ve been here ever since.”