Rosario Dawson is relaxing in her hotel suite at the Four Seasons Beverly Hills when she meets us and is every bit as stunning in person as she is on screen in the Tony Scott thriller, Unstoppable.

Dawson has had quite a career since she was discovered on her stoop outside her New York City apartment building when she was 15 years old.

To this day, Dawson believes her career in film has been a gift. Her first movie role was in the cult smash Kids. It was that performance that led Spike Lee to cast her in his basketball drama, He Got Game, opposite Denzel Washington.

She is reteaming with Washington, although her character, Connie, and Washington only share one scene together in Unstoppable. But it is her desire to work with Tony Scott that has landed her in the driver’s seat as the control woman trying to stop the Unstoppable runaway train before it causes the worst disaster in Pennsylvania history.

Rosario Dawson dishes

SheKnows: Your Unstoppable costar, Denzel Washington, has worked with director Tony Scott five times now. How did you find the famed director?

Rosario Dawson: Amazing. Every day I was so excited to go to work. He is just delicious and I wanted to do dances around him, I was so happy to be working with him. He’s so much fun, he’s so much energy. He’d come in every morning at 5 or 6, he always had his pastel hat on [laughs] and just made everyone feel important and loved. This is high stakes, huge crew, the biggest diva in the planet on this train and how difficult it was to maneuver and make it work. For all these things, it was a really hard process for Tony — he said it was the most difficult film he ever shot — which is saying a lot. Yet, he always had that huge smile on his face.

SheKnows: What do you think is his secret?

Rosario Dawson: His intimacy on set, his collaborate way of working. It was baffling to me how incredible he was. It was this incredibly insane shoot and he was just on top of everything. He was just so thoughtful. He got into the little details like putting my hair up in this scene and down in another. He saw it as a means of expressing frustration. That scene in the bathroom where my character is staring into the mirror, that was the ultimate moment of frustration and he nailed it, my character would stare at the mirror and put her hair up. Little things like that, everyone was so calculated. I’ve never had that from a director with those types of minutia. It’s clearly how he works with Denzel Washington and why he keeps coming back.

SheKnows: Sounds like it was inspiring for you.

Rosario Dawson: Totally, there is no excuse for a director now, for me, to be a jerk. You hear about that all the time, it’s just this accepted thing. He does, and has been doing it for years, and still finds time to satisfy my cravings to know about what it was like for him to work with David Bowie on The Hunger. Just like the most delicious stories, he’s just phenomenal.

Rosario Dawson talks Tony

SheKnows: It is his direction that makes the last scene in Unstoppable work. When you finally meet Denzel Washington and Chris Pine, after spending the entire movie on the radio with them from a control room, it really felt like you three were old friends — even though you were just meeting. Did you notice anything in particular while you were filming your scenes with Tony’s direction that would lead you to that moment?

Rosario Dawson: We talked about it. It’s that movie script speak. It’s just one of those things, it’s not the point of the film, when the whole point of the film is establishing all these different types of people. There’s the people who make a situation better, there’s the people who make a situation worse and there’s people who walk into a situation and it was like they were never there. You know [laughs], I always use that analogy to describe people and toilets. Some people leave them cleaner, some people just leave it…I leave it cleaner [laughs]. On the film, my character thought, “I might get fired.” But that’s not the point, this train is going into populated areas and we need to take action. Just in case you don’t understand, this train is like a missile the size of the Chrysler Building. In those scenes, we wanted to make that really present because job security is a huge theme in this movie as well. It’s interesting to see all the different layers going on and Tony takes the time to create that in action films, it is just amazing. Particularly in this one, it is a simple film really. It is amazing how attached the audience becomes to everybody. I think that’s what it is, when you finally see these three get together, you start to see they’re really not that different after all. That’s beautiful. There’s a mutual respect. If we all did our thing right, it would all work out.

SheKnows: He’s also quite the actor’s director, don’t you think?

Rosario Dawson: It’s brilliant the way Tony shoots with multiple cameras all the time capturing every little beat. As calculated as every beat is, we really beat those things in and with all those cameras rolling, everything gets caught. That is not always the case. That’s the genius of what Tony does, to capture the freshness.

Unstoppable as female inspiration

SheKnows: Do you think your character can be thought of as an inspiration to women? She, in the railroad business, is clearly in a man’s world all by herself.

Rosario Dawson: She’s very inspirational to me. She’s not a bitchy, cliche, bossy woman, whatever people would call that type of woman in a man’s world. We wanted to show her as a capable, sensible human being who doesn’t have to go out of her way to prove they know what they’re talking about. She already holds the title of a person who should know what they’re talking about. She didn’t get the title of Yardmaster because she was cute. If anything, that would go against her. Tony cares about character development and it is almost, if not more important, than the action in the action movie. It’s amazing for me to see that all the work we did was not in vain. Back to your question, what I hope girls get from it was to take you away from the idea that she was a woman in a man’s world. So, by the end of the film, you are simply thinking, “Boy, I’m glad that person was in that position at that time.” That was the right person, period. As an actress, I don’t always get to play a character who is not someone’s girlfriend. To not be defined by anything besides her character, it was one of the things that drew me to the project. From the women who have already seen it, they really, really like Connie.

Rosario Dawson: How it all started

SheKnows: I wanted to finish with how you got started in this business. It’s kind of a right person at the right time moment as well, much like Connie in Unstoppable.

Rosario Dawson: I was discovered on my stoop when I was fifteen. Sixteen years later, I’m still acting. I deferred college and never ended up going. It was not something that was obvious, especially from where I came from. I kept constantly waiting to have to get a real job [laughs]. It never did, and that is really amazing. I was really insecure about that for so many years. I couldn’t call myself an actor for a long time. I just thought I was lucky. There are other people who are trained at Juilliard and have been doing it since they were three, I can’t compete with that. I’m not even going to bother. It’s interesting to me all these years later to still be doing it. Not only am I able to say, “I’m an actress,” but also to strive to be a better one. It has been an amazing journey.

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Want to know if you’re a superhero or a supervillain?
Just ask Rosario Dawson, who apparently has the answers and is happy to use them to inspire us to be better people.
Or perhaps she just wants us to go to see her new film? Watch our video from LA reporter Diem to find out.

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Ooh-la-la! Apparently somewhat perturbed by the idea that French men make better lovers, Regis Philbin asks Rosario Dawson for details on her relationship with French DJ Mathieu Schreyer on ‘Live With Regis and Kelly’ (weekdays, syndicated).

“What’s he really like? These French guys, you know, you hear a lot about them. They kind of intimidate American men,” said Philbin.

“Oh, really?” laughed Dawson.

“You know, French men have a reputation of being great lovers. Is that true or not?” Philbin asked.

“I don’t know about reputations, but I know about my man,” Dawson replied. “We’re having our third anniversary on Thanksgiving, so … ”

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I have just uploaded 189 photos of Rosario Dawson from the Lower Eastside Girls Club Ground Breaking from yesterday!

Rosario Dawson has joked that she did all of her own stunts on new movie Unstoppable.

The actress teams up with Denzel Washington and Chris Pine in Tony Scott’s new action packed movie – but Dawson missed out on the stunt work.

And while her part wasn’t as action packed as her co-stars the actress admits that she loved her time on set.

Speaking at the L.A. premiere of the movie she said: “I did my own stunts… [which was mostly] running to my phone.

“It was amazing, I lunged! I really had an amazing time on this,” she said.

“The boys got to do a lot of the action but I made sure I played the frustration for Connie, she’s always throwing her hair up and you see her wanting to be more places than she could be.

“I hold it down in the control room, I did as much action as I possibly could!”

It’s the first role for the actress since The hugely successful Percy Jackson and the Lightening thief earlier this year.

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Hollywood starlet and East Village native Rosario Dawson led a ceremonial groundbreaking for the Lower Eastside Girls Club’s new multimillion-dollar headquarters on Avenue D Friday afternoon.

The award-winning actress — who noted that she was discovered while sitting on a stoop outside her East Village home — joined a host of elected officials clad in pink hard hats to celebrate the construction of the community center.

“We are cementing not just a building here — we are cementing young girls’ futures,” said Dawson, who posed for pictures with Girls Club members and signed autographs for local residents at the event. “This space is a celebration of a neighborhood. Thanks you so much for honoring these girls with this space.”

The 12-story building, which is expected to be completed in 2012, will feature 30,000 square feet of space dedicated exclusively to the club, as well as 78 rental units and ground-floor retail space between East 7th and 8th streets.

Some of the features of the new headquarters include a planetarium, library, multimedia center, dance and yoga studios, laboratory space, kitchen, and an environmentally friendly green roof where members will grow their herbs and flowers.

“This is one of those days you dream about for years,” said LES Girls Club co-founder and director Lyn Pentecost, who has operated the club without a dedicated home for 15 years.

“When we dream, we dream all the way,” she added, in regard to all the building’s features.

Elected officials at the event, including Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Borough President Scott Stringer, all hailed the project a successful marriage of community and government interests.

“They say it takes a village to raise a child,” said Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez. “This is what it’s all about my friends.”

The new headquarters will allow the Girls Club to triple its membership — from 400 currently to 1,200 when the building is completed.

Funds for the project, which sits on formerly city-owned property conveyed to the Girls Club by the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development, came from $25 million in bonds issued by the city Housing Development Corporation.

The building’s nine upper floors will contain a mix of affordable and market-rate apartments, ranging in rent from about $500 to $2,000 per month, said HDC president Marc Jahr.

But more than providing much-needed affordable housing for the community, the new center will birth the next generation of female leaders, officials said.

“We’re going to see these young girls grow into bigger, stronger, more powerful girls than we could ever imagine,” Quinn said. “Girl power!”

Local Councilwoman Rosie Mendez, one of the most instrumental backers of the project, noted that the new headquarters will serve as the first dedicated home for female youth in Lower East Side history.

“We did it!” she said.

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At this point in the “Sin City 2″ news cycle, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that we’ve heard it all before. Robert Rodriguez can’t wait to start! All the cast members are ready to go! Etc., etc. Still, we have hope! And it doesn’t stop us asking key participants like Rosario Dawson what they’ve heard about a possible start date.

“I have not heard very much except that Robert [Rodriguez] is still insistent that we’re going to make it and we’re going to make sure to put something in there for Brittany [Murphy] to recognize her,” the “Unstoppable” actress revealed. “Unfortunately it’s been so long now and she’s not with us anymore and she was a huge integral part to that first film, it would be important to do that.”

“I’m even more inspired to get it done now,” she added.

With the actors, filmmakers and fans all on board for the long-delayed, much-discussed potential sequel to Robert Rodriguez’s 2005 adaptation of Frank Miller’s celebrated comic book noir, the sticking points likely involve studio dollars and scheduling.

Particularly for Rodriguez, who just came off “Machete” and is currently in the midst of “Spy Kids 4,” and constantly mentioned in the continuing “Deadpool” discussions. Nevertheless, he has insisted that it will never be too late for a “Sin City 2.”

“No, never, but I just don’t want to wait that long,” he said. “I know Frank doesn’t want to wait that long.”

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I have added 300+ HQ/MQ photos of Rosario from the premiere and after-party of “Unstoppable” as well as photos from the 2010 Women’s Conference.