BRESLIN

If this acting thing doesn’t work out, Abigail Breslin wouldn’t mind being a veterinarian one day, but then there’s the blood thing.

“I had to go to the vet with my dog, and she had to have blood taken from her, and I just couldn’t do it,” says the 13-year-old, scrunching up her face.

Already the veteran of numerous TV shows, commercials and movies with an Oscar nomination, Breslin, who was accompanied by her mother, Kim, seems remarkably normal — not artificially sweet like some child actors or an automaton like some others.

In My Sister’s Keeper, which opened Friday, Breslin plays Anna, an 11-year-old girl who was conceived to keep her cancer-stricken older sister supplied with bone marrow transplants but sues for medical emancipation when her parents want her to donate a kidney.

On this day the young actress was carrying around a yellow rubber duck.

To quote Chico Marx, “Why a duck?” We had been discussing how defiant her character was, and so it was natural to wonder if now that’s she’s a teen ...

“I’m not really the rebellious type,” says Breslin, who is home schooled and lives in New York City. “My idea of fun is really — sort of odd. I get amused very easily. I found this duck in the bathroom today; it made me very happy. So it doesn’t take much for me to feel good. So it wouldn’t take much to give me a thrill, which is either good or bad or just very strange.”

Breslin, who got an Oscar nomination for her role in the film Little Miss Sunshine and has starred in Nim’s Island and Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, started acting at 5. Her first film was M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 Signs. Next up is the horror comedy Zombieland with Bill Murray, which is set for an October release.

That’s a very different film from My Sister’s Keeper, which, of course, required crying, but Breslin says director Nick Cassavetes took care of that.

“If it was a crying scene, he would make the actors off-camera cry just to support the actors in the scene,” says Breslin, who got to utter her first curse word in the movie, which embarrassed her a bit.

But the newly minted teen, (she turned 13 in April) who has Taylor Swift, the Veronicas and Lady Gaga on her iPod, has one thing in common with most actors.

“I would love to direct at some point. I’ve written two scripts,” she says, “and I have seven episodes of a TV show ... . I like to write a lot. I had to write a story for school. It’s kind of scary. It’s about a girl in a mental institution, and I’ve also written a romantic comedy.”

OK. Why not?

“And on the last movie I made I got to go on the dolly and look through the lens of a camera, which seems like a lot of fun.”

Watch out, Ron Howard.