HOLLYWOOD—Cassidy Gifford is young, beautiful, and blond. She grew up with famous parents: dad Frank is a former New York Giant, while mom Kathie Lee is a TV host. It should come as no surprise, then, that the younger Gifford has a starring role in The Gallows, a horror flick, opening Friday (July 10), about the spirits that run wild in a Nebraska high school’s theatre department.

It also shouldn’t be a shock that Gifford plays the classic role of the mean cheerleader in said film. It would, however, be wrong to assume that the acting gig grew out of nepotism, or that Gifford is some Hollywood snob.

“I’ve lost a couple parts when it’s been down to me and one other girl, because maybe she had more followers on Instagram, stuff like that,” she says in a private interview in the theatre department of Hollywood High School.

If it seems like an odd quote from someone with thousands of her own followers on both Twitter and Instagram, well, it is. The online popularity is a relatively new thing, and one senses from the way Gifford talks—cracking her fingers and excitedly blurting out her opinions—that she’s not fully comfortable with this fame thing just yet.

So how did she feel about Esquire calling her a “full-fledged Hollywood starlet” based on one film that hadn’t even been released yet?

“I thought that was a mistake,” she answers with a laugh. “I’m seriously still waiting for them to issue a retraction. Just holding my breath. It was obviously so flattering, but I genuinely didn’t believe it. I was actually at breakfast with one of my girlfriends and I’m in my pyjamas with a hat on, and hat hair, sitting there in the rain, and I showed it to my best friend and she just started laughing hysterically.”

Mercifully, Gifford doesn’t appear to be anything like the Amanda Bynes or Lindsay Lohans of the world. “It’s so funny, growing up in the family that I did and everything, I had such a normal childhood, such a normal life,” she says. “My best friends now are the ones I’ve had since I was three years old.”

She continues: “My dad thought it was the worst thing in the entire world to be an actress. He didn’t understand why I didn’t want to go to an Ivy League school like all of my friends were doing. But for me, I knew what I wanted to do. I loved it my entire life.”

Which brings us to the actual work. Gifford is a self-confessed horror fan, and her character, also named Cassidy (the four main actors in the film play characters bearing their names, à la The Blair Witch Project), does a lot of crying.

Being the generally upbeat person she is, those scenes presented a challenge. The solution? Music.

“It was a [traditional Celtic] song called ‘The Parting Glass’,” Gifford reveals. “The Wailin’ Jennys sang this version. For some reason, I don’t know what it was, we were just driving on a day off, but it triggered something in me. So I would just listen to that on Repeat.”