"Smallville's" Erica Durance tells us her plucky Lois Lane character has had an impact on her even off the set. "When you're doing series work, playing a character for a few years, usually you have to bring something of yourself to it -- and yeah, the character can invade you a little bit," she says. "I come home and she'll still be a part of me, this sassy high energy. My husband is like, 'Chill.'"

Erica Durance Finds Playing Lois Lane on "Smallville" Empowering (Image: Wenn)

On the plus side, "It's helped me become more confident in myself. It's made me a champion of the cause of, basically, women being in charge of their lives and being independent -- doing that and making no apologies for it."

The beautiful Canadian actress also notes that one of the things she's also liked about playing Lois in "Smallville," "is that she shows it's OK to mess up and to be human. You don't have to be perfect. Just keep going. Sometimes being a perfectionist can become counter productive -- if it keeps you from moving forward. There's a beauty in imperfection."

"Smallville" returns for its eighth season Sept. 18, and Erica is more prominently featured this year, as Lois and Clark Kent (Tom Welling) keep moving toward their mature characters on the CW series.

ON HER OWN TIME: Jordana Spiro may be in the spotlight thanks to her TBS comedy "My Boys," but the actress admits she was humbled not too long ago after an encounter with a "fan." "I was sitting outside on the patio of this restaurant and this girl was kind of looking at me and then she walked up to me. I was with my sister and I was like, 'Here we go. Somebody's going to recognize me.' The girl said, 'I'm going to have a party in there and the people of the restaurant told me that if it's going to get noisy then I have to tell the people on the patio. Will that bother you?' I was like, 'No.' Yeah, that's about the extent of my getting recognized."

THE INDUSTRY EYE: Casting of subsidiary roles is underway for Sarah Jessica Parker's HBO pilot, "The Washingtoninenne," based on Jessica Cutler's novel of the same title. Her character's described as a New York publicist who comes to D.C. to be a speechwriter -- who is feisty, sexy, opinionated and abrasive, and determined to take on Washington on her own terms, which apparently include a lot of sex.

Forces on the forthcoming big-screen "In the Midnight Hours" -- the Wilson Pickett-Evelyn Rogers story -- have been casting about for an actor to play Bruce Springsteen. You might recall that The Boss covered the late soul legend's "In the Midnight Hour," and the two performed it together.