Jaime King Is on a Journey

Jaime King had been feeling that something was off. “There’s this strange, volatile energy,” the actress, director and model said on a recent Saturday. She perched on the hearth of a fireplace at her home in Los Angeles, knees to her chest, gaze flitting between the fire and the view beyond a sliding-glass door. “If I’m not looking at you, it’s because I’m listening,” she said to a reporter.

“I was nervous earlier, and then I was like, shaky, and then I was like, whoa, what is this vibration?”

The premiere of her latest film, “Lights Out,” in which she plays a morally corrupt police officer, might have had something to do with her apprehension. Ms. King, a self-described introvert, was about to embark on a promotional blitz that would take her from the hillsides of Hollywood to the scrum of New York.

“Socially speaking, I don’t really go a lot of places,” she said. “Once in a blue moon, I’ll go to the Bungalows,” meaning San Vicente Bungalows, the members-only club that has replaced the Soho House as L.A.’s premier venue for people of means. Besides that, “I’ve been keeping my circle very tight.”

As a teenage model for labels like Christian Dior and Chanel, Ms. King, now 44, graced the covers of magazines, including a 1996 cover story for The New York Times Magazine called “James Is a Girl,” by Jennifer Egan and photographed by Nan Goldin.