Two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington (Training Day, Taking of Pelham 123, American Gangster) teams up again with director Tony Scott (True Romance, Man on Fire, Taking of Pelham 123) to tackle the train system in there new action film ‘Unstoppable.’

The film is about a runaway train carrying a cargo of toxic chemicals. The film pits an engineer and his conductor in a race against time. They’re chasing the runaway train in a separate locomotive and need to bring it under control before it derails on a curve and causes a toxic spill that will decimate a town. Rosario Dawson’s character dispatches the developments to railroad executives and attempts to redirect the runaway train.

Blackfilm.com recently sat down with Mr. Washington and Rosario Dawson to discuss their recently pairing after working together on Spike Lee’s ‘He Got Game’ a few years ago.

blackfilm.com: How complicated was it getting the lingo down because? It seemed like that train terminology was difficult, where you able to understand everything?

Rosario Dawson: I think that falls into the research category that’s why I spent a lot of time talking to Mary Alexander who we had chosen to be the back ground story for Connie. A lot of the time was spent asking her “What does this mean tying off the air breaks, and what does it means if it’s not?” So whatever I was saying I knew what I was talking about which was really helpful. Also what was the energy behind it; is this really important, are does it sound technically really huge but in actuality it’s really simple don’t infusive that. (Laughing) So it was very helpful to know what you’re talking about.

blackfilm.com: Denzel can you talk about playing an average guy who was forced to doing heroic things?

Denzel Washington: What’s an average guy? That’s most of the rest of the world I don’t know what that really means so I don’t worry about that. There is nothing average about someone who can control a 100,000-ton machine and certainly risk his life to do it. See I’m the average guy what they did is not average but I don’t look at them that way, I don’t put them into a slot before I start they are slightly above average (Jokingly)

blackfilm: What were some interesting and helpful things you learned from the real workers at the rail yard?

Denzel Washington: It was great to get a chance to drive the trains everything on them hurts. If you step on a train and hit your knee it hurts. I was always more nervous because Chris and I was looking forward, and you have all these guys & women looking forward in our direction with all these things going 50mph behind them. We can see what’s coming and they couldn’t. Chris and I would be talking hoping they get down. It was great see all that I couldn’t image making this movie on green screen I don’t think it would’ve worked cause you wouldn’t know what getting hit by what we used to simulate rocks hitting Chris I in the face.

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“I’m completely shallow,” actress Rosario Dawson admits to iVillage exclusively about how she first met her “beautiful” boyfriend of three years, French deejay Mathieu Schreyer. “I just saw him at a table across from me at a restaurant. I was really upset because it looked like he was looking at my uncle and not me.” But when Dawson approached her now-beau to ask who he was looking at and he responded, “Well, actually, I’m looking at the both of you” in his French accent, the actress was “hooked.”

And while it may seem gutsy to approach a random man at a restaurant, she’s always been a risk-taker. Her new role in the runaway-train action-thriller Unstoppable pairs her with Denzel Washington, but the two didn’t actually shot their scenes together. “I do know Denzel and it really helped and informs those moments when I’m talking to white Denzel, who was his off-camera guy, who sounds exactly like him, but clearly doesn’t look like him!” she admits.

Watch our exclusive video (above) to find out why Dawson says she can be like a guy (hint: it involves crepes!) and her trick to surviving scary transportation scenarios.

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Like her “Unstoppable” co-stars Denzel Washington and Chris Pine, Rosario Dawson put in serious time and research to prepare for her role in the Tony Scott thriller about a runaway train. Dawson says she had the opportunity to meet with a real-life inspiration for her character: a female rail-yard manager.

“We had a great opportunity, we found this amazing woman, Mary Alexander,” Dawson recently told MTV News. Dawson said she got to pick Alexander’s brain, and peppered her with questions about proper rail-yard vernacular, protocol and technical terminology.

In the film, opening Friday, Dawson plays Connie, a headstrong rail-yard manager who, along with Pine and Washington’s characters, goes up against her corporate bosses in an attempt to stop a train loaded with explosive chemicals from careening into a small town.

“To do that and know it was a woman who went through it, I was like, ‘How did you work your way up? What did that feel like?’ ” she recalled asking Alexander. “You get those obvious clichéd things about a woman working in a men’s industry, but you also get this [explanation]: ‘Listen, this is a high-stakes situation, this doesn’t happen every day but when it does, you want capable people to be there.’

“To be someone composed and a leader in that, that’s what I wanted Connie to be,” Dawson added. “Not just a cool, spunky woman or a bitchy aggressive woman, but just the right person for the job.”

Actress Rosario Dawson answers five questions for USA TODAY.

Rosario Dawson dished on co-stars Chris Pine, Ed Norton and Robert Downey, Jr. on ‘Rachael Ray’ (weekdays, syndicated), recalling juicy behind-the-scenes tidbits with each.

In ‘Unstoppable,’ Dawson co-stars with Pine, who portrayed James T. Kirk in the ‘Star Trek’ reboot. She describes herself as an “uber-Trekkie,” but said she hid that fact from Pine. “He didn’t find out until we were doing press for the movie that I was a Trekkie,” she said. “He goes, ‘How did you hide that from me this whole time?’ [I said,] ‘I didn’t want to geek out on you.’”

Dawson remembered an intimate scene with Norton in ’25th Hour’ that got particularly uncomfortable. “I have to say it was pretty awkward when his girlfriend at the time, Salma Hayek, showed up on set [while] we’re doing the bathtub scene,” she said.

Dawson also said she had a physical scene on a rooftop with Downey in ‘A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints’ that may have gone a bit too far. “So, I get into this scene and I, like, knock him on his forehead,” she said. “And his eyes broke character. It was, like, ‘Do not touch my face.’ I was, like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to get thrown off the roof right now.’”

One of the sexiest stars in Hollywood is trading her SIN CITY leather to take the helm of a runaway train this November. Flanked by co-stars Denzel Washington and Chris Pine, Rosario Dawson plays Connie Hooper, a dispatcher who needs to stop an unstoppable train.

Based, in part, on the true story of two railroad workers from Ohio, UNSTOPPABLE pits Dawson, Pine, and Washington against a runaway train carrying enough combustible and poisonous materials to destroy a city. Dawson’s no wallflower though. While the boys are busy climbing train cars at unbelievable speeds, Dawson’s character has to lead the battle charge while handling the bureaucracy.

To find out more about her role and what drew her to the part, we talked to Dawson herself about aiming for action-oriented roles as a woman and a man known only as “White Denzel.”

Rosario Dawson has remarkable diction for someone who talks so quickly — and, as she readily points out, someone who never formally trained in acting, a point that has shadowed her for more than a decade.

“It’s been the past couple of years that I thought I could say that I’m an actor,” says Dawson in rapid-fire speech. She was discovered on her Manhattan stoop as a teen and cast in 1995′s “Kids,” but with that stroke of fortune came a haunting insecurity. “I was waiting for that Apollo [Theatre] hook to yank me offstage and say, ‘I don’t know how you got in here, but this Juilliard-trained actress is about to go on. So you need to shuffle along, little miss.’ And I’d be like, ‘I get it.’ I never took it for granted that [acting] was always going to be there.”

More than 40 credits later, the actor-activist stars in Tony Scott’s “Unstoppable,” an actioner very loosely based on actual events. She plays yardmaster Connie Hooper, the voice of reason moderating between bottom-line-worshiping corporate guys and a heroic veteran engineer ( Denzel Washington) and hotheaded rookie conductor ( Chris Pine) chasing a runaway train carrying poisonous gas. Dawson’s youthful pursuits served her well for her role as the coolheaded, logical one in the crisis.

“I’m a very practical person, unlike a lot of my solely artistic family and friends. I’ve always thought that college was going to be the way out. I grew up in a squat on the Lower East Side and thought that was cool, but didn’t want to raise my kid like that. I was big on calculus and loved science. That part of me has not gone away, my curiosity about things,” she says. (Maybe it’s that logical side that led her to a certain Vulcan and her proud Trekkie status. She says as a “Star Trek” fan, she still somehow managed to keep her excitement at working with the new Captain Kirk — Pine — to herself.)

“Biology was the thing I loved most, sciences. I dissected an eyeball, a lung, a knee joint. I’m just curious about things.”

That curiosity led her to explore not only the character of Connie, but the world of railroads.

“I loved not doing the clichéd, obvious stuff of making her this über-strong, bitchy, top woman, but someone who’s in control and experienced and doesn’t have anything to prove. It was fun knowing I wasn’t going to be playing someone’s girlfriend or something,” she says, adding that Connie earned her position at the yard and didn’t get any slack from her co-workers. “‘We’re going to be tough with you, see if you can handle it, because these are high-stakes situations every single day.’ People are killed by trains going 4 miles an hour.”

The actress’ perception of the railroad industry changed while working on the film.

“Railroads seem so separate from everything else; it’s part of the hum of the background of American life. But the reality is, it’s the arteries and veins of America. So [the film's potential disaster] could destroy a whole area, but it could also stop us from having spinach on the entire Eastern seaboard,” she says, then adds with a smile, “Trains have always been a background character, but in this it’s a main character. It’s the diva, as a matter of fact. That train was a bitch.”

The energetic Dawson continues to find a balance between acting and activism with groups such as Voto Latino as she believes in herself more and more as an artist.

“I think because that hook never came, I realized in order to be a better actor, you have to allow yourself to call yourself an actor and not to feel silly about it,” she says briskly.

“One of the people who’s great about that is Denzel. He shows just how noble it is to do what he does. If I want to work with people like that, I have to get over the hang-up of whether or not I belong. It’s been 16 years. I’ve got to up the ante.”

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When I sat down last week with Rosario Dawson to talk about her new action thriller Unstoppable (which also stars Chris Pine and Denzel Washington), I had no idea it was going to turn into a conversation about Star Trek. But it did. If you didn’t know, Dawson is a huge Trekkie and we spent a bunch of the time talking about how she wants to be in the Star Trek sequel. She even spoke some Klingon. Of course we also talked about making Unstoppable, dressing for premieres and the double standard between men and women, and she talked about her next project called Girl Walks Into a Bar.

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