FRESH FACE: ‘American Violet’ Star Nicole Beharie

Fresh Face:  Nicole Beharie

Her Current Gig: A new generation’s Erin Brockovich! Nicole Beharie plays the brassy yet gracious, justice-fighting, real-life heroine Dee Roberts in American Violet. During the 2000 election, Roberts — an innocent 24-year-old single mom of four who’s dragged from her job and accused of dealing drugs — battles government corruption and repeated drug sweeps in her small Texas town, where the poor and people of color are brazenly targeted.

You Know This Face … because Beharie, whose magnetic air is arresting, appeared in The Express with Dennis Quaid and her American Violet co-star Charles Dutton. She plays Sarah Ward, the brainy love interest of driven football player Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy, in 1961.    

Why So Fresh? Now press touring with the unflinching Dee Roberts herself and Violet‘s keen director Tim Disney (Walt‘s grandnephew) — to promote awareness and activism — the sparky, rising starlet is doin’-it-for-herself as she climbs the industry ladder: “I got a grant from the Annenberg foundation through Julliard [her alma mater] in 2008, so I’m working on my own material for some stage — and employing some of my own fellow actors and musicians to work on a piece … and I just shot a CBS pilot hospital drama … I’m a social worker.”

In Her Own Words … “The thing that was daunting about getting on set were the actors. Being in there with Charles Dutton, Alfre Woodard, Tim Blake Nelson … and Anthony Mackie; Xzibit — all people that I’ve been watching, gone to school with [Mackie], seen their work and now I’m on set with them. And I have far less experience; but — something to do [finally] … And I’m missing simple things like, ‘Where’s my eyeline?’ [Laughs] I did not know to ask that question. So, I’m just like acting the scene [Reenacting fluster] and they’re like, ‘Wait — you’re off! Move to the side.’ And I’m like, ‘OK, I don’t know this, so …?’ I’d never taken a basic camera class … now they have it [at Julliard]. Now that I’ve left.”

The Last Word:  A foreign servicemen’s daughter, who moved about from Nigeria to Panama and got the acting bug while performing for her isolated family — then “fell in love” with the craft at performing arts school in South Carolina — already notes, hers is not the traditional trail: “My path has been very different from the plan. ‘Cause the plan was: You graduate from Julliard … you do Law & Order … you hold some [tribal] spears at the Public Theater … And, it’s just been like: I skipped graduation … and did The Express and then did this [Violet]. And I’ve been skirting around, trying to figure out my own way at this [acting] thing.”