It’s less than two weeks from Halloween when the Georgia Straight reaches Victoria Justice, and the lazy sod still doesn’t have her costume sorted out. “I’m super last minute when it comes to my costume, every year!” she pleads during a call from Toronto. “I’m thinking I might be the ‘Gangnam Style’ guy, but I dunno. I feel like a lot of people are gonna do that.”

Last year, the Nickelodeon starlet was Sally Bowles from Cabaret (and nobody did that). “I had the short black wig, big lashes, fishnets, the whole shebang,” she says. More accurately, Justice was Liza Minelli as Sally Bowles from Cabaret. Justice gushes about Minelli and her mom, Judy Garland. Most 19-year-olds wouldn’t know these people from Billy Barty (and they definitely wouldn’t know Billy Barty), but Justice is hardly typical for her age group.

She was acting on TV by the age of 10, and a few years later she had her own Dan Schneider–produced tween sitcom, Victorious, not to mention the odd hit record under her belt. Justice was also taking the occasional feature role in family fare like The Boy Who Cried Werewolf, but she’s aiming for a different demographic with her new film, Fun Size (opening Friday [October 26]).

“I think it has a little bit of edge to it,” she says of the PG-13 movie, which she goes on to describe as Adventures in Babysitting “with a tinge of Superbad”. She’s also quick to add that “it isn’t anything that’s going to freak people out,” but moms and dads can assume that Fun Size—being the tale of a Halloween that goes many shades of wrong thanks to an annoying little brother and some very badly misapplied Nair, among other unlikely things—isn’t quite Pippi Longstocking.

Indeed, asked to dish on the toughest thing she was tasked with in the determinedly raucous comedy, Justice replies: “Keep a straight face when our car was being humped by a chicken. That was hard.” She also shares some scenes with Chelsea Handler as her mom and Johnny Knoxville in his full-bore white-trash mode—hardly the kind of people that turn up on the side of your kid’s lunchbox.

“Maybe a year ago I had to be super-conscious of the family audience that watches Victorious,” Justice says. “But the show’s coming to an end now, so I think I’m at a point in my career where I’m transitioning into slightly more mature and grown-up material. I mean, it’s nothing too crazy. I think I still identify with the teen audience, obviously, but, hopefully, the young kids will grow with me.”

They could do worse. Asked to name a performer she respects in particular, Justice reaches way back into the mists of time. “I really admire Mick Jagger in a lot of ways,” she says after a thoughtful pause. “I think everything he does is 150-percent Mick Jagger, and I really respect his work ethic and the fact that he is so fearless. I’d like to think I’m the same way, in some ways.”

Hey, Jagger was still swotting it up at the London School of Economics when he was Justice’s age. She’s got Her Majesty beat right there.

Watch the trailer for Fun Size.