"My first audition was the worst I have ever done, ever," she recently revealed. "It was quite an extreme scene, where my character goes from crying to brutally stabbing her father. It was a huge challenge and I just thought, 'Well, thanks for having me in, but I know that I will never come back for this one...'"

Little did she know that the audition would mark an exciting new journey in her awesome career. Despite her worries, she easily got the part - a much-coveted role in the big budget vamp flick, Daybreakers, starring opposite Hollywood heavyweights Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe. And it's all been uphill from there for the 24-year-old.

It's easy to forget, considering her meteoric rise to the big-time, but it was only a bit over five years ago that Isabel even started acting. Plucked from obscurity by an insightful theatrical agent under a mango tree whilst at a market, the bronze beauty was brought in for a role on the hit soap, Home and Away, despite having absolutely no acting experience. After winning the Logie for "Most Popular New Talent" following her first season with the show, it was obvious big things were in store for Isabel, and she's continuing to live up to that promise with her burgeoning new Hollywood career.

Most excitingly, she pulled off a huge coup last year by scoring a hotly-contested role in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the upcoming sequel to the blockbuster hit, where she's acting opposite superstar cutie (and her rumoured boy pal), Shia LaBeouf. Despite keeping quiet on their rumoured relationship, the two seem near inseparable since that scary car accident in which Shia flipped his truck, injuring his hand and leaving Isabel with a nasty headache (luckily it wasn't serious!).

Transformer fans are a geeky bunch, which means the internet has been buzzing with intrigue over Isabel's role in the sequel. Blog rumours have her playing a Decepticon (they're the baddies) in a pretty girl's body, which sounds both awesome and scary. But the coolest news is that she apparently gets to drive Bumblebee in the movie (ZOMG! Too cool!).

"I'm playing the role of Alice, and she's a student at Princeton University," Isabel recently dished online. "The role for me didn't necessarily involve that many stunts, but it was a very physical role. There were a couple of scenes where I had different sorts of action sequences, and where I was in a harness and had to get pulled up above the roof and things like that. But Megan [Fox] and Shia were lucky in that they got to do more of that sorta stunt work."

It seems that kinda physical work is right up Isabel's alley. The actress is well-known for her eco activism and charity work (she's an ambassador for WWF and supports organisations like Sea Shepherd and The Whaleman Foundation), and made headline news just over a year ago when a video showed her and fellow star protestor Hayden Panettiere, struggling to intercept a Japanese whaling ship, mid-slaughter. An arrest warrant was issued for the pair by the Japanese government, but Isabel took it all in her stride. "If we go back to Japan there's the risk we would be arrested at the airport, but they can't do anything while we're away," she told reporters just after the incident.

It's that kinda determination and desire to fight for what she believes in that makes Isabel one of our fave It-girls. And with three big films (Daybreakers, Waiting City, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) and a television series (Steven Spielberg's The Pacific) premiering this year, we're getting excited to see more of Isabel than ever!