Sudden Limelight

Actress Laura San Giacomo prowls through the film “sex, lies, and videotape” as erotically, and crankily, as a predator in heat. Critics are calling up adjectives like “lubricious” and “totally sexual and confident” to describe her performance in the role of Cynthia.

San Giacomo’s first film role “was not easy for me to do,” the husky-voiced actress said, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes in a booth at Musso and Frank’s. “Compared to Cynthia, I guess I’m pretty low-key.”

Still, she said she enjoys doing material that requires a stretch. “You get this character who’s written on a page, and you have yourself, and you try to bridge that gap from the clues that a writer gives you. That’s the really fascinating part.”

Before “sex, lies,” the 27-year-old, New Jersey-born San Giacomo lived the life of a New York stage actress, waiting tables between parts in regional and Off-Broadway productions (“Beirut,” “North Shore Fish,” “My Papa’s Wine”).

She experienced a rush of attention from Hollywood after the premiere of “sex, lies” at the U.S. Film Festival in January, even before the film won the Gold Palm at Cannes. Since then, she has finished one film and is about to start another.

In “Vital Signs,” a Fox picture due out this fall, San Giacomo plays a devoted wife working as a waitress to put her husband through medical school. In Disney/Touchstone’s “3,000,” she will play “a little druggie prostitute who’s kind of a waif.”

“Hookers!” she exclaims, gesturing outside toward Hollywood Boulevard, where real hookers walk and where “3,000” will be shot. “I can’t wait to get out there.”