[Si] TV

In terms of sacredness for women, hair salon appointments are neck-in-neck with Grey’s Anatomy viewings. Yet, as the faucet pours in preparation for a mane-washing, Dania Ramirez has her priorities in check. On this late July afternoon, the in-demand actress is simultaneously conducting an interview, via cell phone, and occupying her Los Angeles-based stylist’s chair. “I wish days had more hours,” she reasons, “ 24 isn’t enough. You have to make it, though work, and I do my best.”

An hour earlier, the 27-year-old, Dominican thespian was sweating bullets in a gymnasium, meeting with a personal trainer to sculpt her physique for her current means of employment, portraying a new, dark addition to the cast of NBC’s science fiction smash Heroes. Her character, the shady Maya Herrara, will be unveiled once the hit series returns in late September. Screw formal introductions, though. When viewers first see Herrara, they’ll be met with a vigilante on the run who’s heading toward the Mexican border with her twin brother (played by Puerto Rican singer/actor Shalim Ortiz) in hopes of entering America. The source of her criminal record—it’s a mysterious superpower that tight-lipped Ramirez can only describe as “friggin’ cool.” “Everything surrounding the show is really intense, but I absolutely love it,” she says. “I’m so cool. Not in an arrogant way, but my character is the coolest.”

Opportune moments have defined Ramirez’s career since day one. Having worked steadily since 2000, the actress has walked that fine line between “one to watch” and “breakthrough” for years. Blessed with picture-perfect physique and a radiating smile, she instantly demands oratory response in whatever role she inhabits. If looks were her only selling point, however, she’d have never left behind her Puerto Rican Day parade duties (which she held down in her mid-teens as a model, riding down Manhattan streets atop Telemundo floats). Her one-in-a-million exterior package aside, Ramirez exudes an around-the-way-girl charm on screen, giving the impression that she’d be as quick to cop a quarter-water with you as she would be to pose for red carpet snapshots.

Oddly enough, Ramirez never intended to act. Born and raised in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, she’s the middle child of three sisters. Ramirez didn’t relocate to New York’s Washington Heights section to live with her parents until age 10. Shifting to New Jersey’s heavily-Latin city of West New York months later, she earned paychecks as a bag-lady at a local bodega. It was a remedial job with unexpected dividends. At 15, a customer convinced her to pursue modeling. Inspired by the mystique of show business, she also began taking acting classes. At 16, she was cast in a Spike Lee-directed episode of HBO’s 1997 series Subway Stories: Tales from the Underground the day before she started classes at Jersey’s Montclair State University (she started schooling early in the Dominican, allowing her to enter college at merely 16). “That was when I realized, ‘Maybe this is real,’” she remembers. “‘A legend [Lee] is noticing me, telling me that I’m talented. That’s when it became my passion.”

After earning her Communications degree and playing four years of collegiate volleyball, Ramirez moved to Los Angeles in 2000 to devote all her energy to acting. Driving cross country with barely any money, made the move was risky. Fortunately, the repercussions have been grand. Over the last seven calendars, she’s appeared in two Spike Lee joints (The 25th Hour, She Hate Me), beautified idiot-boxes (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Sopranos), and joined a mega-franchise (getting physical with Halle Berry as Callisto in X-Men: The Last Stand).

With her latest project, the John Singleton-produced, Franc Reyes-written/directed Illegal Tender, Ramirez is set to become every man’s ultimate fantasy. Playing Anna, a middle-class Connecticut college student whose first-ever love (played by Rick Gonzalez becomes a reluctant gangster to combat familial corruptness, she’s the ride-or-die chick that fellas dream about. “Her journey is to decide if this love is worth everything she’s about to go through, including possible death,” Ramirez explains. “She ultimately chooses to stay by his side, no matter how rough it gets. She’s that shoulder for him to lean on, the reason for him to keep fighting.”

What’s excites Ramirez the most about Illegal Tender, though, is its barrier-breaking approach to Latin perceptions. “Just to be able to do a movie in English, with a whole Latin cast, written/directed by a Latino, and it not be stereotypical, is incredible,” she says. “Most of the time, when you see an all-Latin cast in English-language film, it’s about the ‘struggles’ of being Latin. This is simply a great action/drama. The same story could’ve been told with Caucasian or African-American actors.”