(Continued)

Co-executive producer Gabe Sachs admits that it's been a delicate balancing act, bringing in returning cast members while being careful not to overshadow the new cast of hotties, who include Degrassi dropout Shenae Grimes and The Wire's Tristan Wilds as the neo-Walshes. He also fretted about keeping the peace on set. "I thought I'd have to put one trailer on the other side of the freeway and one on this side, and post armed guards everywhere," he admits of the much-anticipated Kelly-Brenda reunion. "You hear, 'Oh, God. They're going to kill each other,' but it was nothing like that. When we finally saw them work together we just breathed this huge sigh of relief."

"[President Bush] was going through the receiving line and just stopped, did a double take, and said, 'I used to watch you on 90210 all the time!'"While Doherty has been cast in numerous roles since fleeing the zip code in 1994—on Charmed, North Shore, and the reality series Breaking Up with Shannen Doherty, and in a slew of TV movies—those of us who got to know her as Brenda are damned forever to conflate the two. Indeed, I bungle the name several times during our interview, prompting Brenda ... er, Shannen, to observe, "Now, that's scary." Nonetheless, in person the resemblance is purely superficial. Doherty has a touch of Brenda's coquettishness and speaks in a familiar rapid-fire patter but displays none of her moody intensity.

Affable and pleasantly ironic, she has the eye-rolling humor of someone who's been around the entertainment industry long enough to know how the game is played—she got her first break at age 10 on the series Father Murphy, going on to regular roles on Little House on the Prairie, Our House, and
Heathers—without fully acquiescing to its imperatives. Having consulted her mom on the day's wardrobe (they're very close), she's dressed casually, in a pair of Grass jeans, a loose black top falling off one shoulder, and a towering pair of Azzedine Alaia heels. One wrist is piled high with bangles and a fat steel Rolex. A youthful 37, she has grown out her bangs and wears her dark brown hair well past her shoulders.

Here are a few fun facts about the Real Shannen Doherty: She lives alone in Malibu with her dogs and an enormous collection of shoes numbering well over 300 pairs. Her most recent acquisition is a pair of "super-high heeled nude ankle boots" by Brian Atwood, shoes so exquisitely beautiful that she sometimes just stands there staring at them. In fact, when brush fires threatened her neighborhood not long ago, Doherty made sure her dogs were safe and then stuffed 30 or so of her prized possessions—"all high heels, like nothing reasonable or conducive to running"—into a bag before evacuating the area.

She's unabashedly particular about her food, ordering "a Greek peasant salad, no olives, no tomatoes, no cucumbers, onions, bell peppers, extra cheese, extra, extra, extra dressing, and you know how they cut up the souvlaki chicken on top for me?" And our waiter, Nicholas, seems ecstatically happy to indulge her. "Every time you come in here, the whole place get more value," he gushes in a raspy Greek accent. "It looks much better, too! She has such energy. She attracts." Doherty blushes, joking that she paid him to say that, and Nicholas places his hand over his heart and affirms, "She give me something more than money. She kiss me once in a while."

Doherty spends most of her free time on her own, reading at home, or off riding one of her horses. "I've always been a bit of a loner," she says. "I like to hang out with my friends, but it gets to the point where I'm like, 'Okay, it's enough. Go home. I need to be alone.' "

Though she lives just steps from the beach and was once a decent surfer, she hasn't dipped a toe in the water in years, since she and some of the wardrobe people on North Shore, which was shot in Oahu, decided to try being submerged in a shark cage. "You have a snorkel mask on, you're treading water, and the bars are like this"—she holds her hands about a foot apart—"and I'm not that big, so my legs kept drifting through the bars. They're throwing chum everywhere, and there are like 20 sharks, and I'm, like, floating out of the cage!"

She's a lifelong registered Republican who led the Pledge of Allegiance at the 1992 GOP convention (and caught hell for doing so). Several years back she shook hands with George W. "He was going through the receiving line and just stopped, did a double take, and said, 'I used to watch you on 90210 all the time!'" she recalls. While she still has a soft spot for the president, she acknowledges, "There's problems with our world right now, and our economy sucks."

As for the 2008 election, she hasn't made up her mind. Her top pick, Rudy Giuliani, was defeated in the primary, and she's giving both McCain and Obama a good hard look.