'It's good to be bad,' admits Lara Flynn Boyle of 'Men in Black II'

Sitting at the bar at the Four Seasons in Manhattan, her slim frame sheathed in a terrific little black dress with spaghetti straps, Lara Flynn Boyle looks surprisingly tiny and young, a far cry from Serleena, the man-eating intergalactic butt-kicker she embodies in "Men in Black II."

"Yeah, I look pretty damned good," she says with a feline purr of her onscreen self, sipping something golden from a martini glass. "I thought I looked like Betty-Boop-meets-Pamela-Anderson on a good day. I love it. It's good to be bad. In fact, it's great."

In "MIB II," Boyle, 32, plays an all-powerful alien invader which takes the form of the first Earthling it sees: in this case, from an ad for Victoria's Secret. But even as she strides around Manhattan in black lingerie, Boyle's Serleena is a viciously goal-oriented extraterrestrial. That was part of the joke, Boyle says.

"(Director Barry Sonnenfeld) has a very sarcastic sense of humor," says Boyle, who is quite diminutive. "Knowing my size and how girly I can be, he didn't want to hide that. So he wanted to keep her completely feminine and kitschy, but tough at the same time. He'd call me the 'Big Tiny.' "

Sonnenfeld also poked fun at rumors that spindly Boyle suffered from an eating disorder. So, in several of the film's scenes, he filmed her gobbling massive, fat-laden fast foods.

"It was a nice way to poke fun at what's happened," she says. "But hey, I'm a burger girl, so I had no problem with it."

On the other hand, she wasn't prepared for Sonnenfeld's request that she slip her tongue into the ear of co-star Tommy Lee Jones for one shot.

"That was a new one for me," she says. "I'd known Tommy Lee for about an hour at that point. He was cool and calm; all in a day's work."

Having played everything from nerds ("Wayne's World") to femme fatales ("Red Rock West"), Boyle's identity as an actress has been defined in the past few years by her tough-talking role on TV's "The Practice" and by her romantic association with Jack Nicholson.

"I play a lot of strong women and a lot of smart women now," she says. "A lot of times that translates into being the villain. But there's a strength there when you're portraying someone bright that's very empowering."

Now in her sixth year as assistant district attorney Helen Gamble on "The Practice," Boyle points to that role as the one that changed the perceptions of casting directors, who had been picking her for victim roles after her 2-1/2 years on the "Twin Peaks" TV series.

"David Kelley took me out of anything conventional I'd been doing," she says of the producer and creator of "The Practice."

"He kept me in the courtroom and made people take me seriously. I was in a hurry to get back to TV."

The attention to her private life, including the relationship with Nicholson, amuses Boyle: "I live the good life," she says simply. "And that's interesting to people. I don't deny it; I live an extraordinary life. I'm very lucky."

As for the media coverage, she says, "I don't find any of it bizarre. I just look at the pictures; I don't read the articles anymore."