Like most 6-year-olds, Hallie Eisenberg enjoys collecting Beanie Babies, listening to the Spice Girls and talking about her friends. Let's see, there's Al Pacino ("We really hit it off!") and Russell Crowe ("He taught me how to Rollerblade"), her leading men in an untitled tobacco-industry drama due this fall, and Robin Williams, her costar in the year-end Bicentennial Man. "He wouldn't stop talking," she recalls, "but he was so funny."

Eisenberg can be pretty funny too. Her surreal Pepsi commercials, in which she appears to be channeling the dubbed-in voices of Marlon Brando, Isaac Hayes, Joe Pesci and Aretha Franklin, have made her the most popular child star since Jerry Maguire's Jonathan Lipnicki. "She's really a terrific actress," says Joe Pitka, who directed all of Hallie's Pepsi spots (the sixth of which will be shown this summer), "and a gifted little mimic."

It runs in the family: Eisenberg's mother, Amy, 45, used to entertain as a clown at children's birthday parties near the family's central New Jersey home, and both her siblings (Kerry, 19, and Jesse, 15) also act. The only nonperformer is father Barry, 45, who owns an executive-search firm. At 3, Hallie was recruited by a TV-commercial agent while tagging along with her siblings to an interview. She won her first film role just out of nursery school, playing opposite a parrot in last year's Paulie. "I love doing what I'm doing," she says. Maybe a little too much, frets her mom. The first grader missed 90 out of 180 school days this year but caught up by working with a tutor. "At times I want her to slow down," says Amy. "But Hallie will say, 'Mommy, why are you punishing me?' "