While she’s interested in most things paranormal, Donna Davies has no plans to jump on the teen train to Transylvania. If you ask her about lycan­thropes, she’ll probably only yawn. But if you ask her about zombies, then prepare to get educated, because when it comes to the liv­ing dead, this director knows her stuff.

Red-eyed and poised to rock, the boys of All Time Low con­nect with us from Germany, where they’re gearing up to play the Backstage Club in Munich. On the heels of a two-day stint in Sweden, this is the pop punks’ third show on the Deutschland leg of their European tour, which climaxes in Berlin the following night — and then they’re off to Amsterdam and the U.K. “We’re all on weird time schedules,” laughs frontman Alex Gaskarth.

Jocko Sims isn’t a doctor and doesn’t play one on TV. But had life taken a slightly different turn, this rising star would probably currently be practicing medicine instead of dia­logue lines with the likes of Dennis Hopper. “I was heavily into education and graduated high school in the top five percent of my class,” remarks the native son of San Antonio, Texas. “I thought that being great meant becoming a doctor or a lawyer, so that’s what I had my mind set on, but when I got to college, I took a the­ater class and fell in love with acting.”

Actress Gillian Jacobs has run the gamut of seedy roles during her career, from stripper to junkie to prostitute. Now, as one of the leads of the new NBC comedy, “Community,” she’s playing a college student struggling with Spanish class, a part she embraces as a welcome departure. “I was definitely looking to do something completely different from the roles I’ve been doing the last couple of years,” Jacobs admits. “I kept saying I wanted to do a comedy and I don’t think people quite believed that.”

"Mke Judge is making another movie?” thought Dustin Milligan, as he settled into his new gig on the first season of “90210.” “Awesome! And I get to read it? Even better! And I get to audition for Mike?” Milligan was stoked. Simply trying out for Extract, a movie helmed by the creator of “Beavis and Butt-Head,” “King of the Hill,” and “Office Space,” was a heck of a coup for a young actor looking to sink his teeth into some comedy. “I knew how important this audition would be if I could do it well. When Mike and [Venice-based casting director] Mary Vernieu invited me in and I was able to read for them, it was a dream come true for me in the truest sense. And then to make them laugh — to make Mike Judge laugh — which was happening a few seconds into the audition, I thought, ‘If I don’t get this part, it doesn’t matter. I made this guy chuckle.’ Which sounded alarmingly like Butt-Head’s chuckle.”

No one thinks of ad people as revolutionaries. Instead, they are usually viewed as the people who make pretty editorial propaganda to manipulate us into buying things we don’t need. They work for The Man — they are part of the dreaded ‘system.’ But if you look closer, you might realize that, while it is true they work within those dreaded con­fines, they are also the people who defy it.

One could say that Coco Chanel, the legendary designer, and Anne Fontaine, the influential filmmaker, both female and both French, have at least one trait in com­mon: neither fancies speaking of the past.

Looking out her window at home in rainy Stockholm, singer Anna Ternheim, one of Sweden’s biggest female recording artists, comments, “This is normal for summer.”