episodes of the soap opera. For her performance, she was nominated for Outstanding Teen Performer at the 1997 Soap Opera Digest Awards. Her first film role was in Robert Rodriguez's horror science fiction film The Faculty (1998), written by Kevin Williamson and co-starring Elijah Wood, Josh Hartnett, and Clea DuVall. In the film about strange occurrences involving the teachers of an Ohio high school, Brewster played a popular vindictive cheerleading captain and an editor in chief of the student paper. The film received mixed reviews, but grossed US$40 million in North America. In 1999, she appeared opposite Julia Stiles and Jerry O'Connell in an NBC television miniseries entitled The '60s, playing a student activist. 2000s Brewster starred with Cameron Diaz and Christopher Eccleston in the independent drama The Invisible Circus (2001), portraying a grieving teenage girl who travels to Europe in 1976 in search of answers to the suicide of her older sister. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and received a limited theatrical release. The New York Times felt that Brewster "can't summon a credible range of emotion" in her portrayal. Her breakthrough came afterward in 2001, when she took on the role of Mia Toretto opposite Vin Diesel and Paul Walker in the street racing action film The Fast and the Furious. As she did not have a driver's license, she took driving lessons during production. Todd McCarthy of Variety, in his review for the film, noted that Brewster did a "better job here than she did as a searching teen in the recent The Invisible Circus." The film was a commercial success, grossing over US$207 million worldwide. Following the release of The Fast and the Furious, Brewster took a break from acting to complete her B. A. in English at Yale from which she graduated in 2003. She returned to the screen when she played as a lesbian criminal mastermind in the action comedy D.E.B.S. (2004). A.V. Club dismissed the development of Brewster on-screen relationship with co-star Sara Foster, writing that "D.E.B.S. oscillates between the glib camp smirkiness of its half-hearted action send-up and the thudding earnestness of its romance". It was distributed in limited release. She starred as the love interest of a high school student in the 1970s in the independent teen drama Nearing Grace (2005), which was screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Brewster appeared in the drama Annapolis (2006), directed