After a string of supporting roles in films both memorable and not so memorable, Rosario Dawson is earning Oscar buzz for her starring role opposite Will Smith in the romantic mystery Seven Pounds. It has been a long trek for the striking New York native, who says missing out on great roles to lesser actors in the past decade had left her frustrated and disillusioned.
“I’ve read a lot of great scripts over the years and they’ve not been parts that I could go for – they were offered to somebody else with a bigger profile,” Dawson says. “I’ve always had it in the back of my head that I could show people (who matter) that I’m a great actor – I’ve just never had the chance. That’s not to say I’ve not done good performances – it’s just that nobody has seen them. I’ve lost parts to people and watched the movie later and been like, ‘you slept through this – it’s insulting to me that I didn’t get this part’. I’m not saying I’m the best actor in the world but I know I’m better than that.”
Dawson says that during a low point where she was doubting herself and her career choice, she received a surprise phone call from Oscar winner Dustin Hoffman, who commended her two-scene-performance in the 2006 crime drama A Guide to Recognising Your Saints.
“He broke down my performance. I felt like I was in Tootsie,” she says of his role as a passionate acting coach in the 1982 classic comedy. “He’s such an actor lover – it was phenomenal to hear him. He was literally ‘and when you did this and the look and the way you did that’ and I was like, ‘you saw all of that?’ I’ve been working a long time and you hope for any opportunity to come up. It’s not necessarily just because someone is talented that they are going to get places – it’s tenaciousness.”
Big break
But the svelte 29-year-old, who speaks her mind at a machine-gun pace, says when her casting in Seven Pounds – the biggest break of her career – was confirmed, she felt overwhelmed.
“The fact that you hope for it and you dream of it and then it actually happened, there’s that pressure – the sweat breaks out on your brow and you go, ‘oh, my god, I’ve been saying that if I could, I would, and now I’ve got to see if I can’,” she says with a throaty laugh. “It was definitely a big deal.”
Dawson plays Emily Posa, a brave but lonely woman whose life is ruled by her desperate wait for a heart transplant, with a seemingly chance encounter with a mysterious man, played by Smith, changing her life and her heart forever.
“It was really interesting and amazing getting into the research for this character – someone waiting for a heart transplant and all the issues they have to deal with,” Dawson says. “She understood that nobody has tomorrow guaranteed so she was going to be grateful for today and she was going to smile. I had to think, ‘wow, what if I got told I only had six weeks to live?’ ”
Dawson, who looks every centimetre the movie star in a curve-hugging pencil skirt, silk shirt and designer heels, knows what it’s like to struggle and have a chance encounter change her life forever.
Chance discovery
She was famously discovered at age 15 while sitting on her front veranda in New York City, when director Larry Clark spotted her and asked if she wanted to be in a movie. That controversial film, Kids, offered a gritty portrayal of teen drug use and unsafe sex in New York and set Dawson and fellow street discovery and co-star Chloe Sevigny on track to Hollywood. Dawson earned supporting roles in films big and small, including Sin City, Rent, 25th Hour, Clerks II, Shattered Glass, Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse: Death Proof and flop epic Alexander. But despite a constant stream of work, Dawson says her entry into acting saw her constantly questioning her abilities.
“For so many years I had a really hard time calling myself an actor because I was discovered into acting,” she says. “I always kind of felt that that Apollo hook was going to come out and be like, ‘what the hell are you doing here? You snuck your way in and that’s real cute and everything but now it’s time for the professionals’. I’m grateful for a friend of mine who helped me along the way to being able to say I was an actor because she said, ‘you know, Rosario, if someone had come up to me in the street and asked me to be in a film, I would have said no, so the fact that you said yes was significant and already you were owning your destiny’. It took me a few more years to still not go, ‘I should have gone to college and gotten a real job’. It’s not always been the easiest ride but it’s been a really interesting one and I can sit back now and go, ‘well, I didn’t go to college but Spike Lee’s been my teacher, Will Smith’s been my teacher, I’m actually doing alright’.”
Dawson’s mother, an aspiring singer, became pregnant with her in her teens and the actor spent her early years living in a squat in Manhattan’s then rough Lower East Side neighbourhood.
Humble roots
Dawson says her humble roots surrounded by struggling artists made her nervous about giving up studying civil engineering at New York’s Columbia University to focus on acting.
“I grew up around a lot of artists who were hungry and frustrated,” she says. “I was very aware that my mum was a singer who never got to fully realise her dreams and my uncle Gus was a comic book artist but was always struggling cheque to cheque and my grandmother was a poet and a photographer and a painter – all these people also had real jobs and that was what you did. I loved the artists around me but there was a fear that I just wasn’t going to get by. I was going to be the first one in my family to go to college and that was very, very important to me and then I became an actor.”
Dawson, who is single after splitting with actor Jason Lewis (who played Samantha Jones’s young hunk Smith Jerrod in Sex and the City) says motherhood has been on her mind as she nears 30.
“I’m looking forward to getting out of my insecure 20s and getting into a place where I can be more fully the woman that I imagine myself to be,” she says, flashing a huge smile. “I’m starting to feel the clock ticking a bit. My mom got pregnant with me at 16 but I’m going to be 30 next year and I’m starting to think, ‘well, maybe there is something to having a kid a little bit younger’ because my mom’s 46 and it’s kind of amazing the relationship I have with her.”
Source: Sunday Mail
