"I find it strange being mentioned as some sort of accomplishment or triumph," says Vardalos, the unlikely writer-star of the unlikely box-office smash of 2002, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
It's only weight loss, after all, and the only reason she bothered was because "I had to. I had a blood sugar issue," as well as thyroid disease, and diabetes in her family tree, and so her doctor insisted.
"To be told you have to do something, what a bummer," she says.
It's clear that Vardalos doesn't like being told what to do, or adhering to some Hollywood conventions. This is the woman who wrote her own ticket into Hollywood, after being infamously told by an agent that she wasn't pretty enough to be a leading lady or fat enough to be a character actress.
"I'm like this everywoman in terms of my looks," Vardalos says over a glass of iced tea. "I had to write my scripts in the first place because I don't look like Nicole Kidman. I continue to write parts I want to play."
In person, the actress radiates a kind of sunny, albeit definitely determined, optimism. Her laugh is ready and enveloping.
At 46, Vardalos returns to the screen after a three-year absence, with two romantic comedies. In My Life in Ruins (in New Zealand cinemas next week), Vardalos plays a burned-out tour guide, resigned to a bus trip from hell around Greece with a disparate bunch of tourists, who falls for a Greek bus driver.
In I Hate Valentine's Day, which she also wrote and directed, she stars as a snappy, commitment-phobic florist who will date men only five times before a mandated break-up, a plan that goes awry when John Corbett (her Greek Wedding co-star) opens a restaurant on her street.
As she notes: "In the movies, you often see the average-looking guy with the incredibly attractive woman. In my movies, you see the average-looking woman with the super-hot John Corbett. I'm happy to make those movies for all of us women. Guess what? We need people like me on screen. That's what movies are. You go and escape for a sec."
One of the themes of My Life in Ruins is a woman who has lost her kefi, the Greek word for life force or passion. It's an idea that clearly resonated when Vardalos read the script (which was written by The Simpsons writer Mike Reiss), and she later tweaked the script to accentuate it.
Despite the success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which catapulted Vardalos from struggling unknown to Oscar-nominated star, she was hardly doing Greek dances for years after.
"I had lost my mojo a little bit," she says, before adding bluntly, "I had come to the end of a 10-year infertility battle. It knocked me on my butt. I had to just walk away.
"It was a big secret that I was keeping during all of the success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, when everyone was saying she's so lucky. I fully appreciate the luck that came my way, but I was secretly, silently praying for the simplest act in the world, to carry a child to term. Career success is empty without a family for me."
She pauses tremulously.
"I think that's why I'm so joyous right now."
Last year, after wrapping My Life in Ruins and I Hate Valentine's Day, Vardalos and her husband, Ian Gomez, were matched with a 3-year-old girl through an American foster-care agency. It had been a long wait, with a series of disappointments as previous adoption plans had fallen through.
"I love my daughter so much," she says. "It's the reason I breathe every day."
Screenwriter Reiss is a self-admitted bus-tour junkie. He estimates he has logged some 38 bus tours including in Asia, South America and Europe. He calls travel his form of a "controlled substance" and notes "in my experience, 95% of my tour guides have been women and gay men. They seem enormously over-qualified. All my tour directors have been brilliant, learned. They're erudite but they're stuck finding the bathroom every two hours for all the people on the bus, handling money orders, and just doing so much clerical work."
Despite being known for his sardonic tone (he also created the TV show The Critic), Reiss wrote the sweeter My Life in Ruins as a spec and, upon the suggestion of his wife, sent it to Vardalos, who flipped for the script.
"I think I'm one of the few married, adult, straight men who just loved Big Fat Greek Wedding, " he says. "It was a perfect fit."
Vardalos says the unexpected script provoked the "strange realisation that I had finally found something that could lure me back on camera. Not to say I'm super-picky. I'll put it as bluntly as possible. It's not like Martin Scorsese called me. It was easy to just lay back and say, 'I'm going to wait and just write'."
Yet, when Vardalos committed, she really committed. For the film, she not only flew to Greece to take the tours, scout and cast but also to persuade the Greek Government to let them shoot at the Acropolis.
"She's like a cheerleader," My Life in Ruins director Donald Petrie says about Vardalos. "I've got to tell you, the tour-guide persona is not far off. You really kind of see her in life going 'OK, everybody, this way'."
In her years away from the screen, Vardalos wrote six scripts, including I Hate Valentine's Day, which was based on a title given to her by producers William Sherak, Madeleine Sherak and Jason Shuman.
Her budget was half of that for My Big Fat Greek Wedding and she had to shoot the entire film in a hot, 18-day rush in Brooklyn, abetted by a veritable platoon of her friends (including Corbett), who appear in the movie.
"For me it was like hosting a big party where you get to choose the napkins, glasses, water, the music," she says of her directorial debut. "You get to paint a picture, but it takes a village."
Still, she doesn't want to pretend that writing, directing and starring in her own movie was a breeze.
"I should have choked under the pressure," she says, laughing. "But Second City [comedy club] really taught me there is no crying in comedy. Just go, go, go."
