Hollywood casts its eye on an ex-fashion model

Bridget Moynahan is not an overnight success. And that suits the actress just fine.

“I have been very lucky starting with small roles and building and building,” the leggy former model says. Instant stardom, she says, would be too hard for her to handle. “And I don’t have the experience.”

For the last three years, Moynahan, 30, has generally been cast as “the significant other of”: the haute couture wife of Mr. Big on HBO’s “Sex and the City”; the sweet fiancee of John Cusack in “Serendipity”; and as the doctor/girlfriend of Ben Affleck, who nearly dies in a nuclear explosion, in “The Sum of All Fears.” She returns as a “significant other of” in her latest film, the political thriller “The Recruit,” which opened Friday. In her biggest role to date, Moynahan is the girlfriend of a CIA recruit played by Irish hunk-of-the-moment Colin Farrell. But she’s more than his main squeeze -- Moynahan’s no-nonsense Layla is also a CIA trainee who may or may not be a double agent.

“It’s really hard to find roles for women in commercial movies where you don’t just feel they are tacked on the side as the love interest or whatever,” says “Recruit” director Roger Donaldson. “In this part, she’s part of the plot. She really has got that concept and worked hard to make it work.”

Just a few hours before the movie’s Hollywood premiere festivities earlier this week, Moynahan was ensconced at a corner table in a health food restaurant in Brentwood. Even sans makeup and with her hair pulled back, she’s stunning, but she comes across as friendly and very accessible. Unlike a lot of performers, she has no controlling publicist in tow.

“She’s a fun person to be around socially,” says Donaldson, but when it comes to work, “she’s smart ... and she comes well-prepared.”

Moynahan deglamorized for “The Recruit,” cutting her long brown tresses into a short, unkempt bob. Her makeup is kept to a minimum. It was her idea to cut her hair. “The long hair seems so feminine and sexy and high maintenance,” she says, nursing a cup of tea. She hadn’t had short hair in nearly a decade, so she didn’t have any clue if it would work. But Donaldson gave her the go-ahead to cut it. He says, “I thought the short hair made her look a little bit more interesting in the role.”

Moynahan says she had been looking for a meaty role like Layla, and she admits she’s not at the point where she can choose. “I have just been lucky that I was in the right place at the right time. I auditioned. I was put on tape, but I didn’t read with Colin. I had a meeting with Roger and that was it.”

She credits writer Mitch Glazer for keeping Layla’s feminine side in the film. “In these type of movies, the female seems very masculine.”

If she and Farrell have a lot of chemistry on screen, they also did off screen.

“He and I just became really good friends and partners on this. We went to each other; mostly I went to him when I had a question or anxieties about things. We just had this relationship that clicked. He was so good to work with.”

The same was true of Al Pacino, who plays their tough-nosed recruiter. “He was wonderful,” she says. “There were a lot of monologues for him to do, so I got a front-row seat watching him do monologues. He would come in and not worry about time.”

Born in Binghamton, N.Y., and raised in Longmeadow, Mass., Moynahan fell into modeling -- she never read fashion magazines growing up. She was a jock who played varsity-level lacrosse, basketball and soccer in high school. But again, she was at the right place at the right time when a friend who wanted to audition to become a model asked Moynahan to accompany her. Her friend wasn’t signed by the modeling agency, but Moynahan was.

“My family didn’t want their little girl going off [to New York] and modeling,” says Moynahan, who has two brothers and two sisters. “They wanted me to continue school. But it was an opportunity I wanted to take advantage of. I had a very successful career. I traveled all over. I lived in Paris and Milan. I went around the world and met a lot of good people and made some good money.”

Then about five years ago, Moynahan decided she was tired of posing and decided to give acting a try.

After taking private lessons with one acting coach whom she describes as manipulative, she found acting teacher Cay Michael Patten through a friend. Patten let her “go slow and opened me up to this whole thing,” she says. “It was the best experience.”

Through her class, she met and became friends with a community of theater performers. She become involved in a reading series and subsequently landed a role in an independent film, “Twist of Fate.”

“Michael Bergman is the director’s name,” she says. “He took me from nowhere and let me play in this little film.”

“Sex and the City” and the 2002 box-office hit “Coyote Ugly” soon followed.

Her parents, she reports, are “extremely proud” but do worry when she isn’t working. “At some point, you end up having a lot of time in between projects,” says Moynahan. “My mother always reads articles about Gwyneth Paltrow and all of these people who have family in [show] business. My mother says, ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you out,’ and I say, ‘It’s OK. I’m doing OK.’ ”