A star turn on screen for Feijoo

Cuban-born ballerina Lorena Feijoo is well known to Southland audiences from her performances with San Francisco Ballet at the Orange County Performing Arts Center and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. But the SFB principal has lately taken on a completely new role: as a nightclub dancer and the love interest of actor Andy Garcia in the coming feature film “The Lost City.”

Feijoo recently finished nine days of location shooting in the Dominican Republic for the film, set in Havana during the Cuban Revolution. “It was a fun, unexpected thing,” she says, explaining that she met Garcia when he was shooting “Twisted” in San Francisco a year and a half ago. He asked her then if she would play a flamenco dancer in that thriller, but she turned him down (“It wasn’t my thing”).

However, she changed her mind about a big-screen appearance after Garcia saw her dance the ballerina role in “Don Quixote” at the Pavilion last October and approached her about portraying a Tropicana-style cabaret star in his latest project. She filmed two solos, she says: one on pointe, “in a white dress, with a fan and a gardenia in my hair -- very Cuban, very ‘50s,” and the other Afro-Cuban in style.

She has no love scenes with Garcia, Feijoo says. “We never kiss,” but a dialogue sequence in her dressing room shows “there’s something going on between them.”