Check out the add in this month’s issue of Glamour magazine with Rosario Dawson in her Ford Cares T-shirt. Ford and your Ford dealer are recruiting Warriors to help ramp up the fight against breast cancer. Ford Warriors in Pink can be found at the Komen Race for the Cure® events as always, only now they will arrive as a united front, as one in Warrior gear. Learn about the special meaning behind the Warriors in Pink symbols or read the published articles about these strong individuals all across America here. Be sure to check out the contest to win Warriors in Pink gear or a 2012 Ford Focus.

Check out Rosario Dawson in this month’s 15th anniversary issue of Latina Magazine. Full scans can be viewed here.

Check out the full scans from the August Issue of Shape Magazine with cover girl Rosario Dawson! Click here to view.

Check out the issue of Siempre Mujer from this past summer, the scans have now been added to the gallery here.

We’re so excited to share this extended promo of Latina’s upcoming special with Access Hollywood that will be airing across the country this Saturday and Sunday. The hour-long special spotlights the fifteen influential Latina celebrities highlighted on our historic 15th anniversary cover. Natalie Morales, news anchor & co-host of NBC’s Today show and Latina’s parenting columnist, is hosting. Featuring exclusive behind-the-scenes video of the making of Latina magazine’s historic 15th anniversary cover, as well as never-before-seen video and new interviews, each women talks about their rise to stardom and what it means to be Latina today.

Air times are listed below, but be sure to check your local listings:

New York City: Saturday 7-7:30PM/ Sunday 2-3AM

Los Angeles: Saturday 4-5PM /Sunday 12-1AM

Chicago: Saturday 6-7PM / Sunday 12:35-1:35AM

Philadelphia: Saturday 7-8PM / Sunday 1:05-2:05AM

San Francisco: Saturday 7-8PM / Sunday 1-2AM

DC: Sunday 12:35-1:35AM

Miami: Saturday 7-8PM

San Diego: Sunday 9-10PM & 12-1AM

Hartford: Saturday 7-8PM

For more listings, click where to watch

Rosario Dawson Acts Up
July/August 2011 Issue (read original article here)

Rosario Dawson never pined to be an actress. Her family, squatting in an abandoned tenement building in New York City, was just trying to make it. Then, when she was 15, the director of Kids spotted her on her front stoop, and her life has been a cascade of film roles, from Rent to Sin City, ever since. (You can see her in Zookeeper, a new comedy in theaters this week.) But the sexy starlet hasn’t forgotten her hardscrabble roots. Dawson, now 32, remains outspoken on everything from violence against women to the politics of the census. Naturally, the self-described “Twitterholic” was “best-dressed” at the White House correspondents’ dinner (so says that noted fashion arbiter Politico).

I caught up with Dawson as she was getting ready for a show by her friend Prince—and a visit with President Obama. She had so much to say about her various projects that we didn’t even get to her Star Trek yen (yes, she speaks Klingon) or the Paul Rudd crotch-grabbing incident last year when she defended a fondled Eva Mendes (and women everywhere). Suffice it to say, the lady’s got range.

Mother Jones: You’re in Girl Walks Into a Bar, the first straight-to-YouTube feature film. Is this where the industry is headed?

Rosario Dawson: Oh, hell yeah! With the recession, people are having to choose between their cable and their internet connection. And think about it. When they started making made-for-TV movies, people thought it was a fluke. Who would watch that? Because it’s in your TV screen and not in a theater. Remember that?

MJ: How is digital distribution changing the game for you as an actor?

RD: It’s a whole other way of communicating with your fans and giving them content at their leisure. It’s like, there are people making music in their igloos on their PDAs. You’re going to see the exact same thing with film. I’ve been in this industry for 16 years, and I feel very excited about it again. Back in the day, you’d walk down to a street corner and see some people making a story with a hat in front of them. It’s ancient entertainment, ancient storytelling and oral history—now we’re doing it on YouTube. We were all freaked out by the whole HD thing, that it would show every pore on a person’s face. Personally when I first saw it I said, wow, everything looks like porn! This is too real! But you get so desensitized, you just get used to it.

MJ: You were actually doing online productions before it was the current rage, producing and starring in online-only shows. Can you have more fun in this milieu since there are lower production costs, like can you experiment more?

RD: There wasn’t a whole lot of precedence before us. Maybe it wasn’t going to be a success, and they were going to spend this money and we weren’t going to be able to recoup it. We just put ourselves out there and it was fun, we were shooting in LA, with unions, and it just was great to just feel like, okay, we’re trying something else so let’s see what happens. You’re not spending an entire three days shooting half a page where everyone is sitting in their trailers for most of the time. I’ve just been very excited that over the years I’ve constantly had those types of different experiences. I like staying a little bit like acting school, not experimental, necessarily, but just fun. I have the best job in the world: I pretend for a living. You can’t get too precious about that.

MJ: You started Voto Latino in 2004 in the throes of the Bush Administration, where channeling outrage was pretty straightforward. Is the sell more complicated now?

RD: Yeah, but I think nuance is very important to have in the conversation, nuance that’s been lacking for a long time. A lot of voting organizations only exist every four years, putting all this money into “your voice is important!” Wouldn’t that be nice, if that’s all it took? Voting is the first political action for most people. But if you don’t follow up then voting is not actual participation but just a one-off. That person has no accountability or political cost to what they said they were going to do and what they ended up doing. This is the only free country in the world that’s doing lobbying. Voters should be the lobbyists. If we can spend all of this time with all these different celebrities who fill up the internet and magazines then we should be able to keep an eye on politicians because they might cost you your job and your home and your life savings. Don’t you want to know who they are? When people start to complain, “Voting doesn’t matter,” I’m like, the people of Wisconsin weren’t boycotting and hitting the streets and blowing up those rooms because voting didn’t change those situations for them. That was their livelihood. There’s revolution going on all over the world because they actually can’t have a voice.

MJ: You produced a series of telenovela spoofs for YouTube called La Pasion de la Decision that are essentially voting soap operas. Activism used to be so earnest. Has it lightened up a bit?

RD: The reason we do activism is because, maybe you haven’t been raped or abused, but there are millions of people who can’t say the same, and when you hear their stories you may be a little bit compelled. And it doesn’t have to be dark. In the Congo, there are women who’ve been raped and re-raped, and they’re so powerful, and they can carry trees on their heads, and they’re dancing!

MJ: What is it about Twitter that makes it a good mix for you as an actor and activist?

RD: I really like Twitter. It’s a conversation and it reminds me of having stranger conversations on the train. I’m a New Yorker. I’m used to bumping into strangers, acknowledging them, them acknowledging me, even if it’s just with an eyebrow lift. And maybe you just have those impromptu conversations, or where all of the sudden you’re standing on the corner waiting to cross the street and you notice three people looking up and you look up with them. And you all smile at each other because you’re seeing a little piece of a rainbow between two buildings, and that little [rainbow] and you all just shared a New York moment, and that’s awesome, and then you keep on in your way. (What’s odd about it is that I see it as these moments and then other people, I’ll reply to someone, and they’re like, “Follow me back, let’s be friends!” and I’m like, “See, on the train you have a great conversation between stops and you don’t necessarily exchange phone numbers. It’s not that deep, actually. Why can’t the moment just be what it is?”) I grew up and I’ve worked with people who have been very present, a) either always jumping to whatever is most modern technologically advanced sort of thing, or b) people in this industry, like Kevin Smith, who, his communication with his fans is hugely connected to his success. And he was talking about that years ago. And David Bowie was doing that years ago. And Prince was doing that years ago. There have been people who’ve understood it for a long time, who’ve gone, okay, this is a medium I get. It’s not a phase; it’s not a fad; it’s actually something quite vital and important, and it’s pretty fascinating to watch that.

For me it’s great because I am very political about stuff, and I do have a lot of issues that I care about. Twitter frees me up from being on the red carpet and feeling like I have all of these things to say, but it’s not the appropriate time to be talking about rape in the Congo. I’m in high heels, I’m wearing a fabulous dress, people want me to just smile and talk about my movie because I only have three minutes, and that’s my job. I do have people who are like, “Yo, I think someone hacked into your Twitter account to talk about census forms.” I’m like, “No, that’s me.” There are people who don’t like celebrities who tweet about politics—to whom I say, don’t follow me. Thank you for liking Sin City. I can completely understand if you watch that movie and then I talk about single-use plastic bags and you’re a little confused, maybe put off: “You should be talking about machine guns! In a sexy way!” I’m sorry, that’s not me.

MJ: Any hashtag you wish would take the Twitterverse by storm?

RD: I am the queen of hashtags! I love hashtags. I think in hashtags. I wish I could write everything in hashtag. Me and my friends, we do this little two-finger-on-two-finger thing when we talk to each other, because we’re Twitterholics. Maybe #acceptance. I feel like we pay a lot of attention to the word “tolerance,” and I don’t really like it. I get it, but I don’t need you to tolerate this. It is. When you accept something, it’s much deeper.

MJ: Why do you suppose that actors work so hard to remain apolitical?

RD: From Marilyn Monroe and beyond, that’s a huge part of Hollywood, creating a persona that’s mysterious and fairly simple, though it’s interesting how that’s changing: Now, you have fans who are like, “Um, yeah, I just emailed with Barack Obama and tweeted with Lady Gaga, so I’m kinda right there with you; give it to me.” I get that people are a little allergic to celebrities using their voices, but I grew up a squatter on the Lower East Side, so it’s kind of a given that I’d have very strong opinions on everything from cyclical violence to teenage pregnancy to environmental justice.

MJ: You don’t see mainstream films being made about poor people very often. Winter’s Bone, about life in the Missouri Ozarks, was made because it was backed by someone who was independently wealthy. It seems like the types of movies that are made could change if budgets are smaller, you can communicate wholly different messages to a worldwide audience.

RD: People watch more documentaries too now. These movies that would normally be shown in these little art houses, and unless you walked by the theater, or happened to read that tiny zine that contained the info for it, or went to a film festival, you might miss it. But now your average Joe can go: “I watched all the action movies on my playlist, now let me see what’s playing in documentaries, see if there’s anything I like there. I’ll watch this one on sports, and I’ll watch this other one, and then, all right, let me see this one on the private-prison system and the privatization of water and…holy shit!” It’s kind of amazing and in some ways it’s shocking to me how much information is out there and still how little we look at it to inform. Once upon a time if we saw whale murders were happening, people were hitting the streets and we had to stop them. And now The Cove wins awards, and no one’s doing anything about the dolphins. And then you see Inside Job, and you’re like, “Why aren’t people hitting the streets over this, what does it take?” You can watch a documentary at three o’clock in the afternoon and get really, really angry, and then just when you’re about to get up to call your congressman, a commercial comes on and you’re like, “Oh my God, I love that laughing baby, it’s so cute!” Wait a minute, no, this was a big thing you just saw, why don’t you get active about it? I don’t put all my eggs in any basket and go, now with social media we can just be social activists; no, we have to really choose to do take action. And it’s a long day, and you want to just play your video game. And believe me, I love playing Red Dead Redemption or Arkham Asylum, too. I get it; it’s not about always being so vigilant all the time. It’s about finding that balance.

MJ: When you were just 19, Prince invited you to do the intro commentary on his “1999” remix. He also called you the “voice of a generation.” You seem to have taken that to heart.

RD: He just saw me. Maybe more so than I saw myself at that time. I take it very seriously. And it’s not all like beautiful-smelling roses all the time. There’s room for improvement. And I’m young enough. My grandmother will vote, but she looks at some of the political stuff I do and says, “That’s a young person’s game.” But then there’s Dolores Huerta—she’s what, 80? And she’s saying, “I’m not tired, I’m still marching—what’s your excuse?”

Actress Rosario Dawson hosted an exclusive cocktail reception last night at Tao in the Venetian to launch Love Universe, a lifestyle jewelry collection, and model Linda Vojtova and jewelry designer Genevieve Jones were on hand to present their Love Universe-branded collections.

The evening also spotlighted Love Pledge, which encourages people to commit 1 percent of their annual earnings and 1 percent of their annual time to philanthropic causes and charitable organizations of their choice.

Rosario wore Love Universe bracelets in honor of her grandmother, who recently passed away. She shared how generous her grandmother was and that the actress was dedicating her Love Pledge to her grandmother.

After dining in Tao’s private dining room, Rosario, whose credits include Rent, Sin City, Seven Pounds and TV’s Gemini Division, and the Love Universe team took over the skyboxes in the nightclub, and later Rosario and her girlfriends headed down to dance on the catwalk to the sounds of DJ Reach, who gave her a shout-out.

Rosario dedicated her Love Pledge to her grandmother who just passed away and wore Love Universe bracelets in her honor.

Credit: Las Vegas Sun

Check out Elliot In The Morning online

“I can’t believe you’re not eating more of this,” says Rosario Dawson, slim and tightly bound in a red sheath while presiding over a spread of polenta fries, seared tuna and artichokes.
With an easy, big grin, she’s already warned about the spicy aioli sent up from Gemma, her favorite restaurant at the Bowery Hotel. After 20 minutes of animatedly gabbing about Voto Latino, the voter registration group she has been tweeting about, conversation shifts to the reason she’s here.

Dawson has landed in the high-impact world of Unstoppable, the action thriller in theaters today that follows yardmaster Connie Hooper (Dawson) trying to rein in an out-of-control train the size of a skyscraper packed with explosive materials. Based on a true story, the intense, popcorn flier of a movie leans on the talents of a hardheaded rail veteran (Denzel Washington) and a young upstart (Chris Pine) to save the day.

With nary a CGI or 3-D effect, “the crew really went through it,” says Dawson, who is de-glammed and stuck in command central in the movie while Washington and Pine swing from locomotives. “They were outside hanging off a train at 50 mph and just getting these shots and helicopters are swooping everywhere.” Her voice is tinged with jealousy.

Dawson shares limited screen time with Washington — now on his fifth film with director Tony Scott (The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Man on Fire) — but “he brings something very noble to the craft of acting,” she says. He’s “very old-school and just very, like, makes me want to just up my game a little bit.”

It has been 15 years since Dawson, 31, was plucked from a stoop in New York’s Lower East Side to star in the cult hit Kids, and the star has managed to keep her cool, even in the calorically challenged Hollywood culture.

“I’ll sit down with a bunch of actors, and all of the men as well as the women will all take the top half of their bread off — if not also the bottom,” she says. “And I’m like, am I literally the only person who’s eating both pieces of bread on my sandwich? It’s called a sandwich for that reason, people. It’s got to be a sandwich between something. Hello!”

The native New Yorker has built a “chill” life in Venice Beach, Calif., with her French boyfriend, Mathieu Schreyer, a DJ and clothing designer.

“I feel like L.A. has become my adult home,” she says, and the two are rarely “paparazzi’d” — unless she has a movie coming out.

“So we laugh about it: ‘Oh, we’re relevant this month,’ ” she says good-naturedly.

After three years of dating, even her family has started asking when they’re getting married. “That is just the issue of being a woman,” she says with a shrug, and then grins. “I keep saying, ‘Well, I’m trying to get him pregnant, but it’s not working.’ ”

Although Schreyer is press-shy and she loves crowds, Dawson says, they’re a good fit. “He’s got an artist’s lifestyle, so he can come to all my events with me, we can travel together. … We’re on the same schedule, it feels like.”

Dawson exudes the confidence of a woman who has enjoyed the ride of Hollywood but hasn’t indulged in its extremities. The actress is amazed with the frequency of plastic surgery questions she fields (“Is that a 31-year-old question?”) and focuses instead on her activism, including with the Lower East Side Girls Club.

“If I didn’t have my activism sometimes to be that other hat to wear, you could just get really sucked into just being only concerned about what parties you’re going to, who you’re meeting with, what connections you’re making, what your weight is, what you look like.”

She concedes that her résumé, which includes Rent,Sin City, Seven Pounds (opposite Will Smith), Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and art-house fare like Shattered Glass may come off as “all over the place.”

“I was trying out all the different movies — but I like them all,” she says of the indies, big-budget films and Internet formats she has sampled. She eschews a fully booked schedule. “Because you know, of the way I was discovered, I know anything can happen and I never want to get too … ” She pauses. “You know that saying, ‘If you ever want to make God laugh, just make a plan’? I guess it’s that a little bit.”

A glass bottle smashes 3 feet away, and Dawson barely flinches, flicking a shard away from her nude Brian Atwood heel.

Says Scott: “She’s like a female version of me in a way. She loves to challenge herself in different ways with different roles. So she never repeats herself, and that’s what’s great.”

Next, Dawson stars in Girl Walks into a Bar, a YouTube- and Hulu-produced movie with Zachary Quinto and Josh Hartnett to be released free online, and Zookeeper, a studio-sized laugher with Kevin James planned for next summer.

“I’m never going to be America’s sweetheart,” Dawson concedes. Like it or not, “I’m going to surprise you.”

But some surprises are still in store for her. At the conclusion of the interview, her publicist leans over.

“You’ve just confirmed for The Daily Show next week.”

“Yeah!” Dawson yells. Fate has handed her another win.

Rosario Dawson has remarkable diction for someone who talks so quickly — and, as she readily points out, someone who never formally trained in acting, a point that has shadowed her for more than a decade.

“It’s been the past couple of years that I thought I could say that I’m an actor,” says Dawson in rapid-fire speech. She was discovered on her Manhattan stoop as a teen and cast in 1995′s “Kids,” but with that stroke of fortune came a haunting insecurity. “I was waiting for that Apollo [Theatre] hook to yank me offstage and say, ‘I don’t know how you got in here, but this Juilliard-trained actress is about to go on. So you need to shuffle along, little miss.’ And I’d be like, ‘I get it.’ I never took it for granted that [acting] was always going to be there.”

More than 40 credits later, the actor-activist stars in Tony Scott’s “Unstoppable,” an actioner very loosely based on actual events. She plays yardmaster Connie Hooper, the voice of reason moderating between bottom-line-worshiping corporate guys and a heroic veteran engineer ( Denzel Washington) and hotheaded rookie conductor ( Chris Pine) chasing a runaway train carrying poisonous gas. Dawson’s youthful pursuits served her well for her role as the coolheaded, logical one in the crisis.

“I’m a very practical person, unlike a lot of my solely artistic family and friends. I’ve always thought that college was going to be the way out. I grew up in a squat on the Lower East Side and thought that was cool, but didn’t want to raise my kid like that. I was big on calculus and loved science. That part of me has not gone away, my curiosity about things,” she says. (Maybe it’s that logical side that led her to a certain Vulcan and her proud Trekkie status. She says as a “Star Trek” fan, she still somehow managed to keep her excitement at working with the new Captain Kirk — Pine — to herself.)

“Biology was the thing I loved most, sciences. I dissected an eyeball, a lung, a knee joint. I’m just curious about things.”

That curiosity led her to explore not only the character of Connie, but the world of railroads.

“I loved not doing the clichéd, obvious stuff of making her this über-strong, bitchy, top woman, but someone who’s in control and experienced and doesn’t have anything to prove. It was fun knowing I wasn’t going to be playing someone’s girlfriend or something,” she says, adding that Connie earned her position at the yard and didn’t get any slack from her co-workers. “‘We’re going to be tough with you, see if you can handle it, because these are high-stakes situations every single day.’ People are killed by trains going 4 miles an hour.”

The actress’ perception of the railroad industry changed while working on the film.

“Railroads seem so separate from everything else; it’s part of the hum of the background of American life. But the reality is, it’s the arteries and veins of America. So [the film's potential disaster] could destroy a whole area, but it could also stop us from having spinach on the entire Eastern seaboard,” she says, then adds with a smile, “Trains have always been a background character, but in this it’s a main character. It’s the diva, as a matter of fact. That train was a bitch.”

The energetic Dawson continues to find a balance between acting and activism with groups such as Voto Latino as she believes in herself more and more as an artist.

“I think because that hook never came, I realized in order to be a better actor, you have to allow yourself to call yourself an actor and not to feel silly about it,” she says briskly.

“One of the people who’s great about that is Denzel. He shows just how noble it is to do what he does. If I want to work with people like that, I have to get over the hang-up of whether or not I belong. It’s been 16 years. I’ve got to up the ante.”