After well-received roles in indie features such as writer-director George Hickenlooper's "Dogtown" and "Another Day in Paradise" (1998)--where she played the distaff half of a young couple of drug addicts/theives taken under the wings of more experienced operators (James Woods and Melanie Griffith), Wagner went mainstream with supporting turns in such films as a college student-slasher victim in the "Scream"-inspired horror flick "Urban Legends" (1998), as Hugh Hefner's ill-fated assistant Bobbie Arnstein in the TV biopic "Hefner Unauthorized" (1999), in the little-seen thriller "Stranger Than Fiction" (1999), as one of John Cusack's many bedeviling women in "High Fidelity" (2000), and the John Carpenter-produced horror sequel "Vampires: Los Muertos" (2002), as well as Tv spots as a regular on the Mike White-penned, short-lived soap opera "Pasadena" (Fox, 2001) and the equally brief small screen version of Jake Kasdan's "The Zero Effect" (2002) .
Wagner would continue to land leading roles in avant garde indies such as "Wishing Time" (2003) as well as appearing in the ensembles of films such as "Wonderland" (2003), the dazzling but unsatisfying depiction of Los Angeles' real life Wonderland Avenue murders of 1981 which involved porn legend John Holmes; Wagner played a small but winning part as Barbara Richardson, arguably the most innocent of the four murder victims.