Paré landed a small role in Bonanno: A Godfather's Story, a mafia TV movie, during her last year of high school, which convinced her to pursue acting as a career. She also found small roles in an episode of the horror/teen TV series Big Wolf on Campus and in the French film En Vacances in 1999. She dropped out of the fine-arts program at a Montreal college and pursued acting for two years. After auditioning for a bit part for the independent film Stardom (2000), director Denys Arcand chose Paré to star in the film. She played a naive ice hockey player propelled to international stardom as a supermodel, co-starring with Dan Aykroyd; the role paralleled her own involvement with the film. The comedic satire closed the 2000 Cannes Film Festival with mixed reviews from critics. That year, Paré was voted one of the 25 most beautiful people in Canada by a Canadian magazine, a title she didn't take very seriously.

Paré next appeared in Lost and Delirious (2001), starring opposite