At age seventeen, Australian native Isabel Lucas was shopping for groceries in Cairns, a tropical rainforest town by the Great Barrier Reef. “I was under a mango tree at an organic market,” explains Isabel, now 24. “This woman came over and asked if I was interested in modeling. I said, ‘No.'” But the two began chatting and the woman turned out to be an agent who represented actors, not models, and they began a working relationship.

Maintaining a balance between the glamorous life of an actress and the real world seems not to be a challenge for Isabel, but part of her nature. The day she finished her three-year stint on Australia’s hit soap opera, Home and Away, Isabel went backpacking in Spain and Italy to recharge. She returned to film Daybreakers, a futuristic vampire thriller with Ethan Hawke, before flying off to Namibia to volunteer with an agricultural charity organization, explaining, “I just wanted to fill up my cup of life again and be re-inspired.” As casually as if she were describing what she ate for breakfast, Isabel says that she and her fellow volunteers “implanted irrigation for vegetable gardens in the middle of the desert.”

She then went on to land a lead role in this summer’s blockbuster sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, alongside Shia LaBeouf, whom she calls a good friend and “a bag of laughs.” Reflecting on her journey from a village by the sea to Hollywood, Isabel says, “I never really took drama or acting that seriously because I didn’t think it was a realistic path for me.” With her rising star status, it seems like Isabel might need a reality check.