LOS ANGELES — Rachael Leigh Cook was chatting in a hotel lobby about her supporting role as a tough-as-nails FBI agent in TNT’s new drama “Perception” when she heard that Wilson Phillips was singing in an adjacent ballroom.

“Let’s go!” she said, dashing over without hesitation.

The Minneapolis native’s appreciation for the 1990s pop trio is telling — and not just because “Hold On” was a megahit during her impressionable tween years. Like the musical group, Cook has gone from being a marquee name to a Trivial Pursuit answer. The talent is still there; the rabid attention is not.

“That time never felt real to me when it was happening. By the time you realize it, it’s over. That it didn’t continue didn’t feel weird at all.”

Cook, 32, didn’t altogether disappear. In addition to getting married in 2004 to actor Daniel Gillies (“The Vampire Diaries”), she paid the bills by guest-starring on established TV dramas (“Psych,” “The Ghost Whisperer”) and lending her voice to a variety of characters on Comedy Central’s “Robot Chicken.” She also shot a couple of sitcom pilots that failed to get picked up.

But she’s nowhere near the level of fame she rose to a little over a decade ago. After performances in 1999’s “She’s All That” and 2001’s “Josie and the Pussycats,” she had a yearlong fling with People magazine’s future choice for Sexiest Man Alive, Ryan Reynolds.

But Cook quickly decided she didn’t want to be the next Julia Roberts. She preferred to follow the path of her “Pussycats” co-star Parker Posey, an actress who continually straddles the line between commercial and independent film.

For a while, Cook was banging out four movies a year, joking that she preferred working on small-budget projects, if only because the terrible catering service helped keep her weight in check. But when indies took a financial hit, Cook discovered that studios considered her as dated as Carole Lombard.

“You’re not really on their radar anymore,” said Cook, whose last studio film was 2007’s “Nancy Drew.” “I can step outside of myself and sort of see why people think I disappeared for 10 years. I did, by their perception, and I’m totally fine with that.”

But she surprised herself by signing up for “Perception,” a series about neurology professor Daniel Pierce (Eric McCormack), who helps the FBI solve a new crime every week, at least when he’s not hallucinating characters and paranoid scenarios, much in the way Russell Crowe did in “A Beautiful Mind.”

In “Perception,” she’s Kate Moretti, an FBI agent who’s demoted because she cares too much about her cases. Oh, and she also has a daredevil streak that compels her to leap two stories off a fire escape to pounce on a fleeing suspect.