Old Hollywood. That’s the theme of today’s extravagant photo shoot, located in one of L.A.’s oldest gated communities, Fremont Place. Beyond the security checkpoint, 31-year-old starlet Moon Bloodgood is getting the makeover of her life in the backyard of a grand Colonial-style mansion. Having been in the movie biz for just over three years, Moon is quite the opposite of “old.” Bloodgood, in fact, is just getting started in what she hopes will be a long, fruitful career in Tinseltown.

As the makeup artist hovers over Moon’s face, applying powders and creams, Moon discovers that they both hail from the same place: Orange County, Calif. It’s something Moon isn’t very proud of at the moment. “Sometimes I hate being from the O.C. because people think of that show,” she says. “I just feel like that was not my childhood at all. I didn’t grow up with money, and it was ethnically diverse. I didn’t have a bunch of Republicans around me. There’s a whole other culture there that no one really talks about.”

Bloodgood grew up in a low-income housing district in Anaheim with a single immigrant mom taking care of her and older sister Caitlin. “At one point in our lives we were on welfare, and my mom would always bring my sister and I to get food stamps,” recalls Moon. “She felt they wouldn’t be as prejudiced to her because we looked so Caucasian.” Moon and her sister bear a striking resemblance to their father, Shell Bloodgood, who is of Irish-Dutch descent.

“When I was a child I was confused about my heritage,” she says. “When you’re mixed you don’t belong to one culture, you have to learn to adapt to all cultures.”

Moon’s parents met when her father was stationed in Korea. Shortly afterward, the family moved to Nebraska where Moon was born. They divorced when she was just 3 years old, and the split put financial strain on Moon’s mother, Sang Cha.

Being broke was hard enough, but being broke in school was even harder. Moon was always finding ways to mask her family’s poverty.

“I’d wait for all the cute boys to get their lunch, then I’d pull out my yellow card and get my lunch. It was so embarrassing. We were like the government kids.”

Unable to afford dance classes, Moon still managed to make the Bernardo Yorba junior high and Esperanza high school dance teams. Sang Cha would set aside money from her various menial jobs to buy her daughter’s dance outfits, spending more than $3,000 by the time Moon graduated from high school.

“My mom definitely encouraged me to be in the entertainment business,” says Moon. “She was kind of rare. Most of my cousins had to play the piano and go to school, and they all ended up being lawyers. [My mom] kind of saw that I sang and I wanted to dance.”