Growing Up Brewster by Alison Oneacre
W Magazine Jan 2001

She may not be a household name just yet, but at the age of 20 Jordana Brewster has a five-year acting career and a two-year relationship with Hollywood player Mark Wahlberg under her belt. So it's a little ironic that her precociousness almost kept her stranded in teen flick purgatory.

Sitting at a corner table in an Upper West Side cafe' on a rainy New York afternoon, Brewster recalls that landing her first leading role, opposite Cameron Diaz and Blythe Danner in the upcoming The Invisible Circus, was an extremely close call. "The director [Adam Brooks] thought I was too mature,"she says. After Brewster's audition, Brooks asked the actress to come back--but to wear no makeup, to act less confident and to slouch. Brewster complied and, according to Brooks, "she blew everyone in the room away."

To play callow 18-year-old Phoebe O'Connor, who travels to Europe in search of clues to the mystery of her sister's death, Brewster relied on the memory of her own not-so-distant teenage years. But the actress was evidently an early bloomer. She began acting in junior high school, landing the role of Nikki Munson on "As the World Turns" at age 15. More recently, she played supporting roles in the TV miniseries "The 60's" and the teen thriller The Faculty.

Wahlberg, who is nine years Brewster's senior, is her first steady boyfriend. "I alwys liked people who were older than me," Brewster says. "I just can't imagine dating a 20-year-old boy." Still, she confesses that, in high school, the company of her male peers made her so nervous that she threw up before every date. She sights, sips her coffee and says wearily, "Growing up is a process. I'm still going through it."

Brewster's family background undoubtebly contributes to the aura of sophistication she projects. Her Brazilian mother met her American father in London while her grandfathers were both posted there as ambassadors. Her grandfather Kingman Brewster also served as the president of Yale from 1963 to 1977. Jordana was reared in Rio de Janeiro, London and New York. She grew up in an apartment n Fifth Avenue, summoned in the Hamptons and attended a private girl's school, Sacred Heart, before switching to the Professional Children's School.

After acting in some school plays at Sacred Heart, Brewster knew she had found her calling, but she harbored reservations. "I'd herd the tales about young kids acting, the nightmarish stage moms," she said. "My mom let me audition and paid for my head shots, but as soon as they wanted me to sign a contract for As The World Turns, she didn't want me to do it at all." Like any typical eighth grader, Brewster put up a fight. "I cried and screamed and had to beg my mom, promise her I'd still get good grades and go to college."

Which, in fact, she did: Brewser is now a sophomore English major at Yale. Has she befriended her classmate Claire Danes? "No," Brewster says emphatically. "I just think it would be weird if I tried to be friends with her--sort of ridiculous." Instead, she has stuck with her three freshman rommates, who used to kid her when her agent called. "They all told me later that they'd thought I was going ot be the biggest bitch," she says, laughing.

Brewster also downplays her relationship with Wahlberg. She wears three stacked Reinstein-Ross rings on her wedding finger--gifts from her parents--and she is quick to deny reports that she and Wahlberg have tied the knot. "I hae no idea where people got that," she says.

Since The Invisible Circus wrapped, Brewster's career has continued to percolate. She just finished work on the action film The Fast and the Furious, in which she plays a car-racing gang member, and she's still glowing over her inclusion on Vanity Fair's Young Hollywood 2000 cover. "I was always the one who would go out and buy that and think, Oh my God, everyone on there's going ot be a star!" she says. Thanks to the impending Screen Actors Guild strike, her next career move is undetermined. For once, perhaps, Brewster can just be a girl.

"I just passed my driver's test," she confesses, adding that she'll soon be cruising the campus in her new Lexus. "Here I was going to be in a car movie," she giggles, "but I didn't even drive."