She makes a good last impression

WHEN Paula Patton first appears in “Deja Vu,” her acting is stiff, cold and unresponsive. It’s the kind of lifeless performance that could be phoned in by a corpse, but that’s exactly what Patton is playing.

Unlike Kevin Costner’s famous cameo in “The Big Chill” -- that’s his body being dressed for a funeral in the opening credits -- Patton ultimately gets to do a lot more than play dead in a New Orleans morgue. In “Deja Vu’s” time-travel plot, Patton’s Claire Kuchever is very much alive in the rest of the film, as federal agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) tries to protect Kuchever from a domestic terrorist and his plot to blow up a crowded ferry.

Director Tony Scott and screenwriters Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio ask a lot from Patton: If she’s not charismatic and alluring in death, the whole plot won’t click. Carlin essentially has to start falling in love with Kuchever while she’s on a slab, so that he’s motivated to save her. “I did some of my best work dead,” Patton says. “You just hold your breath and concentrate.”

Playing opposite Washington in a big-budget Jerry Bruckheimer production, which opens Nov. 22, would strike almost any actress as the perfect culmination of years of hard work and dedication. The 30-year-old Patton is certainly grateful for receiving this kind of break, but she can’t play the waiting-a-lifetime card -- unbelievably, she’s been acting for only two years.

“I absolutely did not want to be in front of the camera,” Patton says over a lengthy lunch in a French Quarter restaurant during a break in “Deja Vu’s” filming. “I was sure that I wanted to be a filmmaker.”

A 1997 graduate of USC, Patton majored in critical studies in the school’s film department. She wasn’t sure precisely what to do with her degree, so she did what any freshly minted film student would do: She became an assistant, to Howie Mandel. Mandel had a talk show then -- “This was a time when they were just giving away talk shows,” she says -- and while fetching coffee for her boss, she had a chance to meet his guests, including Cameron Diaz, Sarah Jessica Parker, Chris Rock and Mel Gibson.

“I was definitely not thinking about acting,” she says. “Well, that’s a lie. I was dying to get a day job on ‘Boys and Girls.’ ”

She drove up to San Francisco hoping to score a small part in the Freddie Prinze Jr. film. “But when I got there, they said, ‘Could you please go get us some coffee?’ ”

Rather than spend her days running to Starbucks, Patton focused on production and landed an entry-level position on the Discovery Health channel series “Medical Diaries.” In two years, she was producing segments.

The show wasn’t renewed. “And for some reason, I didn’t want to get another job,” Patton says. “I was thinking, maybe what I want to do is write. But I was lying to myself. I wasn’t disciplined. If I was going to be a filmmaker, I would have been out there on the weekends making short films. So at age 27, I said, ‘What did I love to do as a child?’ And ever since I was a kid, I loved to act.”

So the daughter of a teacher (mom) and a lawyer (dad) started taking private acting lessons. “And it just filled me with this joy that I hadn’t had in a long time,” Patton says. She studied for a year before she even looked for work. “I wanted to be ready,” she says.

She was. Her charisma (Patton’s a big hugger) and talent quickly attracted attention. Will Smith’s management company represented her, and Patton earned a small part in the actor’s “Hitch.” Soon thereafter, she was cast as Angel Davenport in the hip-hop musical “Idlewild.” In just her second movie, Patton was playing a lead role.

In casting her in “Deja Vu,” Bruckheimer was struck by an audition that seemed impossibly natural. “You didn’t see the wheels turning,” Bruckheimer says. “You didn’t see the acting. There are no limits for her.”

Does Patton worry about waiting so long to figure out what she would do when she grew up?

“I have no regrets,” Patton says back in Los Angeles, a few days after seeing the finished film for the first time. Echoing the theme of “Deja Vu,” she adds, “I really believe everything was meant to be.”

john.horn@latimes.com