On Movies: Perfect for the role, except . . .

Cool, complicated, and impossibly sexy, Alex, the business traveler played by

Vera Farmiga

in

Up in the Air

, is a role to die for. She spars with - and seduces -

George Clooney's

corporate downsizer (his job: to lay people off). She has collected nearly as many frequent-flyer miles as he has - and prides herself on the efficiency with which she crisscrosses the land, briskly navigating hotel check-ins, airport security lines, rental-car agencies, and chain restaurants.

She knows who she is, what she wants.

But when Farmiga met last year with writer/director Jason Reitman (Oscar-nominated for Juno) to talk over the job, the actress couldn't have been less in the mindset of the character she hoped to play. She was six months pregnant - and Up in the Air was set to start production a mere 60 days after her due date.

"I thought, 'Aw, forget this,' and I really thought, instead of meeting with Jason, I could just make my own audition tape, and keep the camera very close up," she says, with a laugh. But she went ahead and kept the appointment with Reitman, whom she had met a few years earlier when he was casting Thank You for Smoking.

"And I couldn't find anything to wear that day, as often happens in your sixth month of pregnancy. My feet were swollen, I just felt so huge, and I sat down with him, and he immediately started to talk about every single role I'd done since our first meeting - very specifically, so he really had been following me."

But even Reitman, a huge fan of her work in Down to the Bone, in Martin Scorsese's The Departed, and in the unsettling thrillers Joshua and Orphan, wasn't sure Farmiga could be ready in time, physically or emotionally.

"When it came to this role . . . I could not think of another actress," recalls the filmmaker, in a separate interview.

"She was perfect. And then I try to get ahold of her, and I find out that she was in her second trimester. . . . I was nervous. I was legitimately nervous. I was like, 'You can't do this' - I went as far as saying that. And she just came at me strong, and with confidence. And in a weird way, it was her confidence that she knew she could do it that let me know that this woman is so perfect for the role."

Reitman says Farmiga's emotional maturity, and the toughness she projects, make her a rare commodity.

"There are a lot of girls in Hollywood, but there are very few American women," he says. "And Vera doesn't judge her characters, and that's another thing you never find. Usually, when you watch a performance, you can kind of tell what the actor thinks of the character they're playing."

In Up in the Air, which opens Friday at the Ritz Five, Farmiga simply - or not so simply - inhabits the part of Alex. On a certain level, it's a comic, casual role, and the actress' repartee with Clooney recalls the crackling romantic screwballs of the 1930s and '40s. But there's more to the character than first meets the eye.

"Sure, their initial attraction starts off over bonus points and frequent-flyer miles," she says of the relationship between her Alex and Clooney's Ryan. "You could interchange their names. They are two birds of a feather. . . . And then slowly she becomes the gal who really does make him sit back and reinvestigate his ideas about life and love."

Farmiga, 36, grew up in northern New Jersey and studied theater at Syracuse University. She has been working steadily since the day she left college, moving from stage to screen, from little indies to bigger, more commercial fare. Her husband is a carpenter and a musician. They live on a small farm in Upstate New York. Their son - the one she carried leading up to Up in the Air - will have his first birthday early in the new year.

"I had my first costume fitting for Up in the Air two weeks after I gave birth, and I was enormous," she says, smiling. "There was a lot of pressure, but everything panned out.

"I was tired. I had absolutely no sleep. And it was difficult to get into Alex's head space, who was very confident, very sexy, very at ease with herself, at a time when, hormonally, [I was] adjusting to the estrogen levels, and all of that.

"But I was blessed with a joy of a child and a husband who's an ace father and a real nurturing partner for me, so it was as easy as it could have been. But still tough: going back to work, pumping in between takes, having them courier the breast milk to the hotel, but having a good sense of humor about it.

"I took a lot of cues off George," she adds. "He can laugh at himself very easily."

As for the darker themes in Up in the Air - and the scarily timely one of unemployment and a shrinking job market - Farmiga, like most of us, has a personal connection. Her father, a computer systems analyst, has been the "victim of age-ism and corporate downsizing," she says.

When she saw the finished film at the Toronto Film Festival in September - and its opening sequence, with its documentary testimonials from the laid-off and the let-go - Farmiga realized that she was sitting in the theater crying.

"It does put a face - many a face - on unemployment," she says of Reitman's movie, her movie. "And it's very real to me in my own family. I wish that I could just take my frequent-flyer miles and exchange them, instead of flights, for health insurance for my parents. For my dad, who has been laid off several times. . . .

"It's very emotional for me, this film."