TORONTO — Deborah Kara Unger is late for her interview. The publicist at the Hotel Intercontinental explains they're running behind because Unger has a lot of other interviews and a TV crew is still with her.

The media attention should be a good thing for the 37-year-old Vancouver actress who carved out her on-screen persona as, in her words, a "cold, distilled, seemingly inarticulate" woman in such films as Crash, The Game and Payback. She has three films in this year's Toronto International Film Festival - Emile, Stander and Hollywood North - as well as a role in Thirteen, a much-discussed critical hit currently in theatres.

But when she enters the hotel room in blue jeans and a T-shirt, Unger says the day spent speaking to the media has resembled a trip to the dentist.

"Giving interviews and meeting everyone, it's terrifying," she says, lighting a cigarette and using an empty coffee cup as an ash tray.

"I really am shy. You can say I just claim that. I don't. You just ask those ladies if this is true," she says, referring to the publicists in the room next door.

But only part of her aversion to interviews is attributable to her "intuitive shyness and self-consciousness," she says.

She also has an intense dislike for the "unnatural" coupling of film promotion and personality manufacturing going on around her during the film festival.

"I don't like these fake exchanges. I'm not comfortable with them. I don't ever want to get comfortable with them," says Unger.

"There are people that are really good at (being) slick oiled machines, and good on them," she says.

"But this is a film festival, where there are film fans. People that know a lot about film. And there aren't really opportunities to interact with people."

The "fake exchanges" of the day were intended to promote Emile, a magic realist domestic drama directed by Vancouverite Carl Bessai and co-starring Unger, as a bitter divorcee, and Ian McKellen, as an aging professor; and Stander, a bio-pic by Toronto director Bronwen Hughes about a legendary South African cop-turned-bank robber, Andre Stander, played by Thomas Jane. Unger plays his wife in the film.

She took a pass on the junket for her third festival film, Hollywood North, a satire on Canada's tax shelter movie industry in the late 1970s, directed by Torontonian Peter O'Brian, in which she plays a conniving indie filmmaker.

Unger says she is especially annoyed by media attempts to project her icy on-screen persona onto her actual personality.

"That's just not true to me, it's not authentic. It's not organic to any part of me. And it's silly. It's absolutely silly. How I'm complicated is in no way akin to these characters," she says.

Asked about the "cold, distilled and seemingly inarticulate" persona itself, Unger says "those characters are so far from me, I sometimes wonder, 'Why do I get another remote femme? Really, what's with the remote button?' "

Her usual on-screen character, she notes, "doesn't speak, doesn't smile, doesn't crack jokes."

Unger says she writes "interior monologues" for her non-communicative parts. Thus there is always a coherent train of thought running through the characters' minds during their long moments of on-screen silence.

But she says it is getting increasingly challenging to work within such a limited range of expressiveness.

"It would be much easier for me if I had more colours to play with. It's not easy. It's not me that sits back and goes, 'I don't want her to speak and I want her to have blond hair right about there,' " she says.

"Transformational parts," like those she practised as a student at the National Institute for Dramatic Art in Sydney, Australia, and recently performed in Thirteen, are what she really looks forward to these days, says Unger.

"I was a delightfully haggard drunken mess," says Unger of her turn as a fat alcoholic in Thirteen.