from W / by Jamie Rosen

In the new film Maria Full of Grace, Colombian-born newcomer Catalina Sandino Moreno plays a Bogota teenager who becomes a drug mule, boarding a flight to New York with 62 heroin-filled capsules in her stomach. Moreno’s own ticket out of Bogota was more easily won: The 23-year-old actress, who had never read a film script or seen an independent movie before she auditioned, beat out more than 800 girls to nab the role. That’s not to say there weren’t some challenges. During filming, Moreno had to swallow four of the pellets–and though not actually filled with heroin, they still brought on a mean stomachache.

Which may be a small price to pay for her naturalistic and captivating breakthrough performance. Maria Full of Grace won the dramatic audience award at Sundance. And at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, Moreno shared the best actress prize with Monster’s Charlize Theron.

“Watching her, there’s definitely this feeling of witnessing the birth of a star,” says writer-director Joshua Marston, who had so despaired of finding his Maria that he postponed the start of production before he finally saw a tape of Moreno. “She is at once incredibly poised and professional, but she still has this giddy quality.”

Moreno, who had acted in commercials and Bogota theater productions, was studying advertising in college when she got the part. After she shot the second section of the film in New York in 2002, Moreno stayed in the States and took classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Manhattan, where she currently lives But having gulped down those capsules for the higher cause of her art, she has decided that realism has its limits. “I’m not a Method girl,” she says. Instead, she’ll continue to rely on the same instincts that she used to play Maria. She hasn’t found her next role yet, but she’s hoping for “a Latina like Maria that has power, that has strength, that does everything instead of showing some leg.”