Ginnifer Goodwin center stage

WILLIAMSTOWN -- Even as a student at Boston University, actress Ginnifer Goodwin stood out from the crowd. When she auditioned for a spot in the Huntington Theatre Company's production of the Depression-era melodrama "Dead End" before her senior year, director Nicholas Martin was immediately struck with Goodwin's budding talent and ability to captivate a room.

In fact, she made such an impression that Martin decided to create a small role for her in "Dead End" -- his debut production as artistic director at the company -- as one of the poor street kids in the ensemble.

"I had such a ball," Goodwin recalls with a laugh. "[My character] was smoking in the background the entire time. And the boys would keep me entertained by passing me notes and other things during the performances. I even came up with a back story for my character, where I was the town slut, having affairs with all the Dead End boys."

Today Goodwin, 29, is a rising star of the big and small screens, best known for her role as the youngest wife, Margene, on HBO's polygamy drama "Big Love." But she says she'll never forget her first professional acting gig, at the Huntington in 2000. And she always yearned for a return to the stage. So when Martin asked her to play the town tramp Bessie Watty in a rare revival of the 1940 comedy "The Corn is Green" at the Williamstown Theatre Festival this summer, she couldn't resist. The production, which opened officially last night, runs through Aug. 12.

A diehard Red Sox fan, Goodwin was in Boston in the spring for opening weekend at Fenway Park with her boyfriend, actor Chris Klein, when she got a call offering her the role of Bessie -- a troublemaking temptress seeking to raise her social standing by seducing a promising male student who's been taken under the wing of the iron-willed Miss Moffat. (The part earned Joan Lorring a Oscar nomination in the 1945 Bette Davis vehicle.) After reading the script, Goodwin's first reaction was, "I have no idea how to play her, but I am dying to figure it out."

"Usually when I decide to take a job, it's because I see exactly how I want to play the character or how I connect with her," says Goodwin. "This was the first time I read something, and I had no idea what to do with the character. But I could not wait to investigate that."

Goodwin has had her share of memorable roles. Only a few months after receiving her diploma from BU, she landed a recurring part on the NBC sitcom "Ed." She then rocketed to wider fame with memorable supporting turns in "Mona Lisa Smile" and as Johnny Cash's first wife in the Oscar-nominated "Walk the Line." Her well regarded portrayal of Margene in "Big Love," about a family of upwardly mobile polygamists in the Salt Lake City suburbs, officially put her on the map.

But despite her "buy now" stock status in Hollywood, don't expect Goodwin to become a fixture of the online gossip world. Chatting with the actress in a quiet lounge at the Williamstown Theatre Festival's '62 Center for Theatre and Dance, Goodwin evinces none of the traits of the pampered young paparazzi princesses whose debauchery dominates the tabloid rags. There's no high-powered publicist denying access. No haughty attitude or hard-partying circles under her eyes.

Instead, the Memphis-born-and-bred actress comes off as bright, enthusiastic, and adorable. Her dark hair is longish and unstyled after a day of rehearsals, and she's wearing a vintage royal blue dress and brown, knee-high boots. Cheerfully munching on a plate of carrots and celery, she talks excitedly about the challenge of playing Bessie -- a role Martin insists is very difficult to cast.

Mean-spirited, manipulative, and nearly irredeemable, Bessie is a challenge for any actress to pull off. On top of that, she's the pivot around which the play turns. The semi-autobiographical comedy by Emlyn Williams centers on Miss Moffat (Kate Burton), a dedicated teacher in an impoverished Welsh mining town who helps transform the class bully, Morgan, into her star student and a candidate for Oxford. Bessie, though, has other ideas. She seduces Morgan (Burton's real-life son, Morgan Ritchie) and, before long, threatens Miss Moffat's careful cultivation of her protégé's bright future.

"You need somebody who can convincingly play a child, but has the chops of a much more mature actress," observes Martin of Bessie's transformation from a selfish and naive young girl to a conniving enfante terrible. "Give Ginny anything, and she can just turn it around and do it. I think she'll be a household name very soon. We're really lucky to have her."

"[Bessie's] a nasty little one. And that's so juicy to play. So it's been a lot of fun watching Ginny enjoy that process," says costar Becky Ann Baker, who portrays Mrs. Watty, Bessie's mother.

Goodwin may take pleasure in performing the role, but she says it was hard to relate to Bessie in a deeply personal way. Still, she does identify with her in one respect. "I am certainly a drama queen," acknowledges Goodwin with a smile. "I am probably overemotional, and I do need a degree of attention that I find [Bessie] needs as well. . . . However, Bessie always throws a kind of temper tantrum when she doesn't get her way. I never go that far."

While Bessie may be unlikable, Goodwin's character on "Big Love" is mostly lovable in her naiveté. As the easily frazzled, libido-stoked Margene, Goodwin holds her own opposite Jeanne Tripplehorn as the nurturing and maternal Barb and Chloe Sevigny as the twisted manipulator Nicki. Margene's youth and inexperience often land her in absurd situations that quickly spin out of control, to hilarious effect.

Goodwin says that she's enjoyed her character's evolution during the show's second season, which wraps up later this summer. "Margene truly grows this season and finds her voice and uses it," observes Goodwin. "She is realizing that she is a spouse and a peer and does have a say in family matters. And so she starts standing up for herself and decides that she isn't going to be a punching bag any longer. But because she's Margene, she goes too far and gets into mischief, and hijinks ensue."

Goodwin was certain that she blew one of the show's key auditions with some hijinks of her own. It's with a blush of embarrassment that she recalls doing her screen test with Bill Paxton, who was already cast as family patriarch Bill Henrickson. When she was asked to perform a scene with Paxton, whom she had never met, she entered the audition room, shook his hand, then jumped up on him and started kissing him wildly.

"He was clearly thrown, and everyone in the room was clearly thrown," recalls Goodwin. "To this day, I am still mortified."

When she left the building, she called her agent from the parking lot and began apologizing profusely. "I was like, 'I'm such a fool. I molested Bill Paxton, and I'm just so humiliated,' " she recalls. After the agent finally calmed Goodwin down, she put the actress on speaker phone with HBO executives and the "Big Love" creative team, who told her that she had landed the part.

"So the lesson learned is: Make out with Bill Paxton," she says with a laugh.

Goodwin, who will be seen opposite Elijah Wood and boyfriend Klein in "Day Zero," an upcoming drama about the reinstatement of the military draft, and who just wrapped the indie film "The Laws of Motion" with Matthew Perry, Hilary Swank, and Ben Foster, insists that her motivation comes from her drive to explore characters and tell stories that are very different from her own life experience.

"Unlike a lot of actors who might be exorcising demons and various deep-seated emotions, I come from such a healthy family and healthy upbringing," she says. "So for me, it's always been, 'I wonder what it's like to be in these extraordinary circumstances because my family life was so ordinary.' I really like stepping into people's lives in that way."