A talent that's Precious

Gabourey "Gabby" Sidibe was standing on a subway platform in Harlem one Monday in September two years ago, trying to decide: uptown or downtown?

Her friend had mentioned an open-call audition for a movie. The description: African American female, age 18 to 25, plus-size. That was her, and that was the uptown train.

Downtown was her psych class at Mercy College.

Sidibe, who had taken theater classes and been in a few school plays but in no way thought herself an actress, opted for the uptown train anyway.

Her life would never be the same.

In Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire, Sidibe stars in the title role: Claireece "Precious" Jones, an obese, abused 16-year-old pregnant for the second time - by her father. Illiterate, and living in a squalid walk-up apartment with her poisonously despotic mother, Precious seems marked for a life of pain, loss, disaster. And yet, in the audacious, awe-inspiring Sundance and Toronto festivals winner directed by Philadelphia's Lee Daniels, Sidibe's character turns all that around. Precious opens in select area theaters Friday.

"The movie's essential message is to be more compassionate to those who we see are struggling," says its star. "I think we close our eyes to people who are in need, because we don't usually think too far outside of our own selves. I hope that this film changes that in people."

Says Oprah Winfrey, who has been championing Precious since the day she saw it: "When I finished this movie, I said, 'It split me open.'. . . You are in for an experience."

Says Tyler Perry, who likewise has thrown his clout, and fame, behind Precious: "I was immensely moved by it . . . and wanted to do whatever I could to help others share in its redemptive experience."

Says Daniels, who cast Sidibe two days after that first open call - picking the 350-pound, then-24-year-old student over a short list of other contenders: "The reason why I chose Gabby was because the other girls were Precious. Like they were really, really Precious. And Gabby is not that character at all. She talks like a white girl, truly, like she's from the Valley.. . .

"If I had chosen one of those other girls, I would have been exploiting them. Because it's the truth: They were the essence of Precious. Whereas Gabby, though she's from Harlem, she has seen a bit of the world, she is really articulate, she is clearly aware of her physical size, and yet she's able to - she's really secure with herself."

In other words, for Sidibe, daughter of an R&B singer (mom) and Senegalese cab driver (dad), playing the part of Precious was indeed a matter of pretending.

As she says herself, on the phone from the Mill Valley Film Festival in California, recently, "It was pretty easy - there wasn't a struggle at all. I knew who Precious was, and I knew who I was, and those lines never got crossed."

Sidibe (pronounced SIH-deh-bay) isn't being glib or cocky - even as the hype, and the accolades, are starting to point to an Oscar nomination. The performance demanded extraordinarily strong stuff, and from somewhere she found it.

"To be fair, I don't have a lot of education as an actress, and so I don't know any better than to just be the character when I'm supposed to be the character, and be myself when I'm not supposed to be the character," she offers. "And for a role like this, my training, or the lack thereof, really helped because the subject matter - well, there's no way I could have gone home with that character."

For Daniels, 49, the West Philly filmmaking maverick, the Precious project has been like a personal quest for the Holy Grail. In fact, part of his motivation for producing Monster's Ball - the 2001 drama that put him on the map and won Halle Berry her Academy Award - was that the writer Sapphire would take seriously his request to adapt her novel, Push.

"And Sapphire saw Monster's Ball," Daniels recalls, in a recent interview at a Center City hotel. "But she flipped for Shadowboxer. She cried in my arms after Shadowboxer - probably the only one," he adds, laughing.

Shadowboxer, which marked Daniels' debut as a director, was a 2006 movie set in Philadelphia about the relationship between a black hit man (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and his white, older stepmother (Helen Mirren). She too is a hired gun, and the duo are lovers. In one scene they're naked, and extremely amorous, in Fairmount Park.

Like Daniels, his movie was bold, outrageous.

"Sapphire really loved the movie, and, ironically, the financiers that gave me the money to make Precious really loved Shadowboxer," he says. "The only people in the world beside myself that loved the movie financed the film and gave me permission to do this book!"

And so, starting in late 2007 and going into 2008, Daniels was in New York shooting the hard and heavy Precious - improbably casting the comedian Mo'Nique and pop singers Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz in key roles. The former plays the truly monstrous Mary Jones, Precious' mother. Carey, almost unrecognizable, is Ms. Weiss, a New York City social services counselor; Kravitz plays a nurse.

And despite the misery that Sidibe's character endures - the taunts and bullying at school, the contempt and beatings at home, and the brutal scenes of incest - the mood on the set was one of levity and good times.

Sidibe attributes that to Daniels' innate sense of humor, and, of course, to Mo'Nique's. But the unlikely ingenue acknowledges that the laughter and fooling around when the director yelled "Cut!" represented a form of catharsis, too.

"I think we probably did need some relief, because of the subject matter, because it was so heavy," she says. "There were a few times when Mo'Nique would just go off into a rant of jokes. There was this one time when Lee got really mad at us because we started dancing. . . . We were always, like, singing a song or dancing or doing something. . . . We immediately broke character."

Since January, when Precious premiered at Sundance and sparked a bidding war (won by Lionsgate), Sidibe has traveled with the film to Cannes, to Toronto, across the states and overseas. She has found herself at parties, in the company of movie stars and celebs. She has finished work on another film, Yelling to the Sky, with Zoë Kravitz (Lenny's daughter).

"It feels completely surreal," Sidibe says. "Whenever I thought about what I would be doing when I was a grown-up, I always imagined I'd be wearing one of those kind of tacky business suits - the skirt business suit - with a pair of socks and sneakers, going to work.

"And I had a briefcase - not that I knew what's in the briefcase. I'm not sure what my life would have been."