Rosario Dawson

The dangerously sexy star of Seven Pounds talks about growing up poor, hanging out

on nude beaches, her crush on Luke Perry, waiting for that big breakthrough and the

special moment when your grandparents see you naked in a movie

Ql

PLAYBOY: You're best known for playing strong, sexually provocative roles in Sin City, Crindhouse: Death Proof. Alexander and Rent. At the age of 15 you landed a part in the controversial movie Kids even though you had no experience. Where does your confidence come from? DAWSON: My mom gave birth to me when she was 17. My dad was real young too. My mother, who is a gregarious, outspoken, full-of-life six-foot-tall plumber and part-time singer from the Bronx, never spoke to me in a way that messed with my mind-like, "The stork brought you"-but in a real, sometimes overly graphic way about how she had used a condom but it broke. But I got it. When I did Kids. I had no acting training and wasn't into movies, but like my mother, I've always been very observant, a people watcher. That film felt easy for me because I understood I was playing a girl who was really out there, like. "Yeah. I love sex." I was a hundred million miles away from that person, but I had seen her and knew what persona she put on.

Q2

PLAYBOY: Where had you seen girls like the one you play in Kids?

DAWSON: We had squatted in an aban­doned tenement on the Lower East Side for many years while I was growing up, across the street from a crack house and projects where there was a lot of vio­lence and young girls were always get­ting pregnant. At 12 and 13, my teenage years of exploring sexuality, my friend and I would put on our bathing suits and take pictures of ourselves in sexy poses with peach fuzz sticking out of our arm­pits, thinking we were grown women. At 14 and 15, though, I noticed my friends changing the way they looked, thought and acted and becoming sexually active, totally different people, who said. "You know, my man doesn't like to wear con­doms," or bragged, "Oh yeah, we do it raw, dog." Because I was such a late bloomer, I saw all that very clearly with­out being part of it.

Q3

PLAYBOY: How did you avoid a similar fate? DAWSON: Knowledge. I was always very comfortable in my body and couldn't have grown up more healthy. My mom took us to a nude beach all the time

when I was young. She'd say. "I hate tan lines." and off our bathing suits would go. I mean, why should there be any shame or weirdness about something so beautiful and natural?

PLAYBOY: When you look in the mirror, do you have a favorite body part? DAW50N: I have big boobs, but I'm not a boob girl. I've never been flaunty about that. I always used my boobs like a dressing-up kind of thing. It's just your body, you know?

Q5

PLAYBOY: So you never had hang-ups about your appearance? DAWSON: No. but a lot of the kids I knew wore Reeboks or Adidas, and we couldn't afford that so I grew up wearing Con­verse, which now is very cool but at the time made me feel embarrassed. I wore thrift-shop clothes and hand-me-downs, and I was superskinny-the "skinny tad­pole." Everybody used to call me a boy. That traumatized me. but later I real­ized how awful it must have been for the girls who (continued on page 176)

rosario dawson

(continued from page 135) were meanest to me, who said, "You're so flat-chested," as though there was something wrong with me because they had blossomed at 11. Things changed that way for me when I was 15, but that was old compared with a lot of my friends.

Q6

plavboy: Were you aware of playboy as a young woman?

dawson: Yes, and now I collect old issues. They represent such interesting moments in the way the idea of beauty has changed over the years, from the 1950s and 1960s to the 1970s, with that Last Tango in Paris look. From there women got thinner, and there were lots of animal prints. It's fasci­nating watching the changing palette of our beauty.

Q7

playboy: Growing up, how did you rebel against your family?

dawson: I didn't get any tattoos or pierce anything, although my mom wanted her chest pierced for Mother's Day. My dad has a tattoo, and 1 just got him a Harley and a motorcycle for myself. My family's a little screwy, but I didn't really rebel against them until my 20s when I went through that phase of "You ruined my life" and needed to be away from them.

Q8

playboy: Has your family reacted strangely to anything you've done on-screen?

dawson: My grandfather loves war movies and history, but he didn't want to see me naked in Alexander, so my grandmother watched the movie past the point where I was naked, then invited my grandfa­ther in. He said, "This looks really good. I'm going to watch it from the begin­ning." He took the video into his den and watched it, and my grandmother called me, cackling, "Your grandfather saw you naked." I was like, "I know you're retired and everything, but it's sad and scary if you get your kicks by tricking each other into seeing me naked."

Q9

playboy: Did you decide to go to college or try any other line of work after your first movie?

dawson: We ended up moving to Texas; as a New Yorker, I actually thought there would be tumbleweeds blowing down the street, but instead it was a huge suburb. I lived there for a year, but when Kids came out everybody was like, "You've got to act," so I moved back to New York, took Theater 101, suddenly had an agent and got very lucky and started working pretty con-

stantly. When I had that natural freak-out in my 20s—like, "What am I going to do with my life?"—I took precalculus and calculus at the Cooper Union and a civil-engineering course at Columbia.

Q10

pi.avboV: It sounds as if you still hadn't fully bought into the idea of being an actress.

dawson: After Kids Spike Lee cast me in another amazing movie. He Got Game, and people just assumed that's who I was. With the scripts I got after that, 1 didn't see the point of revisiting that kind of character. But I still wasn't sure what I was doing. I didn't feel committed to being an actor then.

Qll

playboy: Has that changed? dawson: As I got a little older I started feeling sexier, and all of a sudden I was doing Sin City. The perception changed that I was this very tough, very sexy woman. The first time the costume designer showed me what she had made for me to wear, it reminded me of my Harley friends who go to Goth parties. I was like, "Hey, man, if I can't wear this outfit at this age, I'll never be able to. We may as well go for it." I walked out of there, went to the hair-and-makeup department, chopped off my hair and came back in. Everyone was upset with me, but the way I've always approached things is, I don't know what will happen tomor­row, but I know I'm committed to this right now.

Q12

playboy: Did your playing a lethally sexy, domineering prostitute in Sin City change how guys acted around you? dawson: I'm a huge comic-book fan, and I co-wrote one we launched two years ago called Occult Crimes Taskforce. I was at Comic-Con for five days, and this sheepish, kind of pulled-back guy kept coming by. He was like, "Can I ask you a question? You seem like you're really nice." I said, "Okay, thank you." And he goes, "But you were scary in Sin City, like, really scary."

Q13

piayboY: Have you ever geeked out when meeting a celebrity you greatly admire? dawson: When I was a teenager collect­ing stickers and hanging out with my girlfriends, I loved Luke Perry on Bev­erly Hills 90210. I wrote him a letter to tell him about it, along with a hate letter to Shannen Doherty. Today I still obsess over David Bowie and Tim Curry. I haven't been able to speak to Tim Curry, who in The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of the most fan­tastic, mind-blowing things I've ever seen. I think those two understand their mortality.

Q14

playboy: As someone who starred in the movie version of Rent, which has a lot to do with mortality, are you in touch with your own?

dawson: Many of my first memories are of growing up with people who had HIV—friends, relatives—so I guess mortality is a big deal to me. I wish I could be alive as fully as some of the people I've known. I read The Sun Also Rises, and with someone who is now an ex-boyfriend I did the same trip as Hemingway and we wound up in Pamplona for the running of the bulls. It was incredible, honestly the most frightening thing I'd ever gone through. It's good to feel alive like that, but I was continuously scared for three months afterward.

Q15

playboy: What has been a peak sensual experience for you so far? dawson: I was in Italy for Fashion Week, and though I had known this particular man for a couple of years, he always had a girlfriend or I had a boyfriend. This was the first time we met when we were both single, and we had a strong flirtation going on. I let him know I was meeting friends for drinks, and he said, "Okay, I'll meet you there." I came downstairs in this gorgeous hotel, wearing an incredible white dress, with my hair and makeup done and bright-red lips. I was hav­ing a drink, and this man watched me from across the room. The ten­sion was there, the history between us was there, and it was just one of those delicious moments like in a movie or a book. It all fed into the rest of this amazing evening. It was charged. Sex can be amazing, but something truly sensual has a different level of inti­macy, a beauty to it that, as an earthy Taurus, I need.

Q16

playboy: As a sexy, earthy Taurus, what other famous woman do you find desirable?

dawson: This is going to get weird because I love David Bowie, but I have to say (man. I did a photo shoot for her, and she suddenly took off her T-shirt to change into another and I was like, "Damn!" She was so beautiful, ele­gant, ciassy and timeless, and there was something really erotic about it. Very few human beings have been that sexy and desirable. I wanted to say, "You are sculpted by God." It was, like, wow.

Q17

playboy: You wow Will Smith in the new film Seven Pounds, in which he plays a guilt-ridden IRS agent who sets out to help seven strangers and you play a young beauty with a serious illness. Big things have been predicted

for the movie, but you've been in that position before, right? dawson: Someone in the British press wrote that the only two good things in Alexander are my left breast and my right breast. It took me more than a year to produce Descent, which had taken a year to write, then a year to shoot and another to edit. It was the hardest thing I've ever done and probably some of my best work, but no one saw it. Every­one thought Rent would explode, and it didn't—although it could last for 100 years. I've gone through interesting ups and downs on this journey of even feel­ing okay with being an actor.

Q18

puybov: What physical qualities in a man turn you on?

dawson: I'm big on hands and fore­arms. Even when nothing else about the guy did it for me, I was still into him because at least his hands and fore­arms could get me kind of excited. I love calves, too, and I have to say I'm an ass woman. I like a nice ass. I'm not looking for a man to seem like one of my girlfriends, but I like a guy who can hang in different situations.

Q19

playboy: When the relationship goes wrong, do you freak out? dawson: I read He's Just Not That Into You. It's so genius about what to do after a breakup: Do not page him, do not answer the phone, don't drunk dial or text him. What's amazing is, when our hearts are broken—men and women, across cul­tures, nationalities and age lines—we all behave the same way. I'm so in love with that. I read that book and thought, You mean I'm not the only asshole idiot who does this? That's such a relief.

Q20

playboy: Are you satisfied with your accom­plishments? What more do you want? dawson: I want my life to be about some­thing. When my mom got pregnant with me at 16, she was just another Puerto Rican who got pregnant and didn't have a husband. She almost aborted me and was in the doctor's office and was about to do it and said, "No, I feel her move," and decided to have me. I'm pro-choice, and I know that was a very hard deci­sion for her. We were the black sheep of the family, and today the same people who used to talk to us like crap are like, "Oh, Rosario." 1 don't condemn them either way. We can be either just another child who was born or some­one you consider special. People erect a statue after a king dies, and other peo­ple tear it down later because he was a dictator. Opinions can change.

Read the 21 st question at playboy.com/21q.