With high-octane oomph and a face seemingly chiseled from stone, Joy Bryant has transformed her early dreams into opportunities that others can only imagine. Born in the Bronx to a teenage mother and raised by her grandmother, the actress has already cut her path through the Ivy League, the fashion world, and now Hollywood, dazzling audiences first in 2002's Antwone Fisher and again in last year's Honey. When she appears in this month's Baadasssss!, Maria Van Peebles's tribute to his father Melvin's career as a trailblazing filmmaker, Bryant not only proves how fabulous she looks in a gigantic period Afro, but also pays tribute to the cinematic ancestors who made her career and those of countless others possible. Here she talks to hip-hop heavyweight and Honey producer, Andre Harrell.

ANDRE HARRELL: Hey, Joy. How you doin'?
JOY BRYANT: I'm good. I'm getting ready to go to New York for a little modeling job.

AH: Ah! Fashion model-turned-character actress going on leading lady. [Bryant laughs] So let's talk about the film you did about Melvin Van Peebles and all that maverick energy he created. Was it the '70s when he put out Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song?

JB: Yeah, it was 1971. It sort of kicked off the whole blaxploitation era because it showed Hollywood there was a market out there--

AH: For a black man fuckin' in the movies?

JB: That's right. [laughs] After Sweetback's success, they were like, "Wait, black people equals money? Okay, cool."

AH: So it's all about Melvin's behind-the-scenes frustration of wanting to take the reins in his own hands. Was there a period when he tried to make the movie and couldn't get it done through the system, or did he just start off saying "I've had enough"?

JB: Well, Melvin had made Watermelon Man [1970], which was a huge success, and success can sometimes be the kiss of death because then people expect you to either do the same thing or do stuff you don't want to do. Then he had this idea for Sweetback and had problems raising money because the content was too hot.

AH: All that sexually explicit stuff that Hollywood wasn't used to dealing with.

JB: Right, they weren't used to that, so he had to go the independent route.

AH: I remember seeing Watermelon Man, where a white guy was subjected to all the racism that the black man had gone through, and what's interesting is that it was a way for a white male to understand how America was treating black society. So Melvin went from a smart, eye-opening way of waking up American society straight to Sweetback--

JB: Where he kind of gave everyone in Hollywood the middle finger. He did what he had to do, spent what he had to spend, and made whatever deals he had to make to get his film made. He was revolutionary. So Sweetback's a great movie in terms of its place in black-cinema history and also in terms of independent filmmaking. All the trials and tribulations of putting your heart and soul and probably all of your money into something when everybody's telling you it's going to fail. Ya dig?

AH: [laughs] So tell me the role you play in the story.

JB: I play Priscilla, who was Melvin's secretary.

AH: You and him didn't have no love affair--

JB: Oh, no, just business. Melvin was more like a role model for my character, who always wanted to be in his movies. So when he goes and puts Priscilla in Sweetback, it's for a scene where she has to be naked. But my character was dating Maurice White from Earth, Wind & Fire, who ended up doing the soundtrack for Sweetback, and he didn't want her doing it, so she backs out. She's a funny character, but not because she's trying to be a comedian; she's funny because she's a little bit of an airhead and naive. It's a lot of fun. I get to wear an Afro and '70s clothes.

AH: That's a long way from Honey. Tell me about the films you've done since then. JB: Well, I did Baadasssss!, and I did a movie called Three Way Split, with this great Australian actor Dominic Purcell and Gina Gershon and Dwight Yoakam. And then I did Haven, with Orlando Bloom and Bill Paxton.

AH: And what are your characters like in those films?

JB: I go from playing this kind of ditzy secretary in Baadasssss! to a femme fatale in Three Way Split. And in Haven, I play a Caribbean secretary, so I have a little Cayman Islands accent. And then I was on E.R. for a few episodes.

AH: You blew up! You were paraplegic, right?

JB: [laughs] No, I had multiple sclerosis. I was on crutches, but--

AH: You was ghetto hot with them! People were typing "Did you see Joy on E.R.?" on the Negro Net--the two-way [pager]. It was two-way hot.

JB: [laughs] And now I start filming The Skeleton Key with Kate Hudson and Peter Sarsgaard and the legendary Gena Rowlands and John Hurt. That's gonna be off the hook.

AH: So being black hasn't seemed to hinder your ability to navigate through Hollywood.

JB: No. For instance, in Three Way Split, that role was written for a white girl. When I met the director and the producer, they were like, "That's an easy change." The thing is, being an actor is hard enough, whether you're black, white, male, or female. And being a black person in America is hard whether you're an actor, a model, you work on Wall Street or whatever, because whether people wanna admit it or not, we have to work way harder than everybody else.