America Ferrera returns to Sundance Film Festival

PARK CITY — America Ferrera came to the Sundance Film Festival eight years ago as an unknown with only one professional acting gig behind her. She's back as a star.

The star of "Ugly Betty" (which ABC announced this week will be canceled after this season) had her coming out party at Sundance in 2002 with "Real Women Have Curves," the tale of a Mexican-American teen caught between her parents' traditional working-class values and her own desire to go to college.

The film won the audience award as the festival favorite chosen by Sundance fans, earned Ferrera an acting prize, and became a calling card for a Hollywood future with "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" and its sequel, along with her TV show.

It was the first professional acting job for Ferrera, who was 17 at the time and struggling for a toehold in a town where curvy Hispanics tend to get cast in working-class ethnic parts while wafer-thin blondes score the best lead roles.

"What's so kind of beautiful about the whole thing was that everything that made me not right for all of those hundreds of commercial auditions that I went on and no one ever wanted me for is what made me perfectly right for 'Real Women Have Curves,' " said Ferrera, 25, who is back at Sundance with the Iraq War homecoming drama "The Dry Land."

"There's not really a choice about, am I going to pursue a typical career? Because I'm not the typical standard, so that's not even an option. I just have to be who I am and seek out things that fit me, are right for me. I was just so lucky with 'Real Women Have Curves.' At that point, I would have done an insurance commercial. I would have done anything."

Written and directed by Ferrera's boyfriend, Ryan Piers Williams, "The Dry Land" features her as a troubled wife dealing with the violent mood swings of her husband (Ryan O'Nan), a soldier afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder from combat in Iraq.

Ferrera had her doubts that Williams would get the film into production, given how other war-on-terror movies have failed to find an audience. Yet her boyfriend was determined, and Ferrera eventually signed on as an executive producer as well as co-star.

"She pushed me so hard to just make the script better and better and better and to just never settle for anything less than the vision I was setting out to make," said Williams, who also made a short film with Ferrera and now makes his feature debut.

Ferrera got in touch with some old friends, including Melissa Leo, who had played her mother in an episode of "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" six years ago.