Clare Preuss

Clare Preuss
Born	1977 (age 46–47) Lethbridge, Alberta
Nationality	Canada
Occupation	actor, director, professor

Clare Preuss is a Canadian actor, director, and community college professor.

As an actor, most of Preuss's work has been in live theatre, but she has played supporting roles in feature films. Her most prominent role was in the film "Mean girls". Her character was the sole girl on the "Mathlete" team that faces the film's heroine's team, in a competition. In one of the film's pivotal scenes, in narration from the film's heroine, the audience hears her outgrow the kind of mean-spirited evaluation of girls largely on their measuring up to narrow standards of beauty.

Over a decade after playing a character who wasn't beautiful Preuss described her feelings when a series of tabloids published stories informing their readers that the actor who played her non-beautiful character was actually beautiful. Preuss described how she felt those writers were undermining one of the film's main themes, that surface beauty wasn't that important. She felt some of those articles implied that her character's lack of surface beauty implied that she was ugly, inside.

In an article entitled When You Tell Me I’m Pretty I Shave My Head" Preuss wrote about how the press coverage triggered her to organize an anti-beauty event. Preuss and some colleagues did have their heads shaved, before an audience. In her article Preuss wrote that "I played Caroline Krafft as a fiercely intelligent, confident, accomplished teenager..." She wrote about how getting into costume, for this character affected her own feelings, and how members of the cast and crew treated her, off-camera. And she wrote about a conversation she had with the film's writer, Tina Fey, who told her that her character's appearance reminded her of how she felt when she was a teenage high school student.