Miss America Ferrera

Take that, fashion beeotches! We knew she had it in her. Those "Ugly Betty braces" and Coke-bottle glasses couldn’t obscure the glamour gal smoldering just below the surface. An icon of empowerment, on the show and off, America Ferrera is fully owning her golden moment. Be sure to check out our behind-the-scenes gallery from America's photo shoot.

It’s a gorgeous Sunday in downtown Manhattan, and Ugly Betty star America Ferrera, wearing Converse sneakers, jeans, a T-shirt and a blue sweater, blends into the crowd as she strolls up the Bowery on the Lower East Side. Just outside the Patricia Field boutique, a former restaurant supply store converted into a temple of candy-colored fashion raunch, Ferrera stops dead in her tracks as the flame-haired proprietor who styled the "Ugly Betty" pilot and created costumes for "Sex and the City," the series and the movie, strides toward the curvaceous young actress. Styled, meet unstyled. Stylist, meet star. Emmy winners, talk amongst yourselves. Ferrera lets out a yelp of recognition: “Is that you? Pat!”

The two embrace. Pat Field is returning to style “Ugly Betty” now that the show will be shooting in New York for its third season. Such a move means that the costumes are about to get that much more on point (if slightly funhouse electric), while cast and crew work closer to the show’s source material, the well-heeled snakepits of glossy fashion magazines. As star and stylist pleasantly schmooze, a pair of tourists descends upon Field, asking for her autograph, oblivious to the other pop culture phenomenon in their midst. Meanwhile, Ferrera quietly checks her BlackBerry.

Such oversights don’t faze Ferrera a bit. Why should they? Put makeup and couture on her and it’s no longer a Cinderella story, a gimmick or send-up of her “Ugly Betty” character. With her cocoa-brown eyes and angular features, she is genuinely beautiful. And over the next few months, that sultry and increasingly confident countenance will be everywhere. Ferrera’s hot factor has propelled four films made over the last five years into release, including The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (another of the films, Towards Darkness, a kidnap drama, she produced). And on television, a fashion-fabulous vortex has been set up for Ferrera to tap into at will.

Pat Field has a few thoughts on the direction Ferrera’s character should take. “Betty’s style has to evolve in a way that makes sense,” explains the den mother of all that’s edgy. “Otherwise, it’s no more than a fashion show on TV. She can’t work for a fashion magazine and not have it influence her. Betty is the only one who is an individual in Mode’s world. If she was in fashion downtown, she would be worshipped.”

How far the petite 24-year-old girl-next-door has come. The last time Ferrera lived in New York, two years ago, she appeared as Charlie Brown’s little sister, Sally, in an off-Broadway play called Dog Sees God. “I was living on Third Street and Avenue A. Although for the longest time, I thought that Times Square was where all the action was!” She chuckles at her cheerful dorky naïveté, a quality that, of course, helped her nail the lead in her hit series when Salma Hayek pitched it to her. Did it bother her at all that Hayek thought her perfect to play the title character in a series called “Ugly Betty?”

“Maybe I have self-confidence I have no right to have!” Ferrera says laughing, brandishing a Cali-Valley accent over a brunch of toast and eggs at a nearby restaurant. Ferrera eats carefully, like a princess: the toast is delicately nibbled and the whites of the eggs are eaten in full before the yolks are disposed of, in tiny precision-cut squares. “Salma pitched this character and this world to me, and it sounded fabulous, this show about a girl who is smart and does everything from the heart. The Columbian version of this show was made before The Devil Wears Prada was ever written. Betty’s ugly in this world. Aren’t we all ugly compared to the expectations we put on ourselves? We eat up those images and only feel worse. It’s fun to explore fashion through Betty and wear these silly expressions of who she is. Fashion is fun expression!”

From the way Ferrera tells it, her journey from geek to goddess is more Todd Solondz than John Hughes. She grew up the youngest of six, in Woodland Hills, a Jewish neighborhood in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. Being outside the cultural loop became the focus of the young Honduran’s teen angst. “All of the boys I had crushes on were Jewish, but they weren’t allowed to date non-Jewish girls,” she says. “So, I Googled how to convert to be a Jew… for a minute. I went to 40 or 50 bar and bat mitzvahs. I wanted a bat mitzvah so badly!” Ferrera cracks up at the memory.
What was once a traumatic identity crisis is dismissed today with a lovely brace-less smile.

Staking out a career path, she was, at first, just as eager but clueless. In tenth grade, she geeked out and attended summer law camp. “We watched My Cousin Vinny,” Ferrera reports, “and I thought, I love this!” But excitement faded after the realities of the profession sunk in—through a courthouse visit, a talk with a judge and a day at a legal library. “I thought, this is definitely not what I want to do.” International relations, another possible career, never quite took off.

Campaigning for Hillary Clinton, Ferrera fulfilled some of her untapped passion for politics, with the bonus attraction of seeing a boss-lady maintaining composure in the hot seat. “The language Hillary used on day one when she spoke about immigration, the environment and Iraq was not like her opponents’ words,” Ferrera says. “And then her opponents started picking up on her language: ‘Don’t give empty promises. Be smart.’ It was about saying what needed to be heard.” What surprised her most about Hillary? “Her warmth,” Ferrera says. “The media says she doesn’t give it off. They want her to be a bitch. I don’t know that I could wake up and face, like she does, a constant attack on myself and my career.”

She’s sympathetic to Hillary, because even the relatively media-unscathed Ferrera has had a taste of what it’s like to be attacked by the press. “How sad that someone has to make up shit about my life. I don’t even know how they pull it out of their asses!” she says, pausing for a moment to recall the most outrageous thing she’s read about herself. “That my boyfriend puts ice cream in the fridge to always keep me happy! I was insulted on so many levels! I told my family that I’m not answering the phone anymore. I send out text messages, like ‘Whatever you read on Perez, I’m still not engaged.’” Nevertheless, Ferrera is media-savvy enough to quickly point out: “Perez is actually really nice to me.”

And it is here, in a rarified and tricky world where dodging Internet blog rumors gets mildly redeemed by splashy nights on the red carpet, that America Ferrera finally finds herself. After trying her hand at the kinds of stable, parent-pleasing careers the rest of her siblings signed on for, from computers to law, she realized that she wanted to be an actress after all. She’d dabbled with the profession first in school plays and community theater, leading to films at the University of South California (where she is only one semester away from graduating) and later, starring roles in chick flicks like Real Women Have Curves (2002). The credit for Ferrera being where she is today, she says, goes to Bette Midler, whose performance in the 1993 television movie of Gypsy inspired her to act. “I wanted to be Bette Midler when I grew up. It’s not about being her,” Ferrera clarifies. “It’s about being myself the way Bette Midler unapologetically has been herself.”

Being herself, these days, means being glamorous—but not 24-7. Today’s incognito look, she explains, “is kind of a vacation for me, since I have to get dressed all the time for work… which is fun.” Meanwhile, at the BlackBook photo shoot, she sang “I’m your dream girl” while getting pedicure, manicure and extensions. Between takes, she sashayed across the room, breaking into the “ooh girl” chorus from MGMT’s hipster-perfect “Electric Feel.” While she makes a great entrance (witness her recent high-voltage appearance on the “Late Show with David Letterman"), knows how to work a gown and is more than happy to receive designer loot—of today’s wardrobe, she notes that she’s probably only paid for her socks—Ferrera says that the shopping bug has not bitten her yet. Blame it on an incident in her college years when she spent all of her money on a dream car, a BMW, and then had to borrow cash from her mom to pay for schoolbooks.

“I was so ashamed. I felt like the biggest asshole,” she says. “I’m really bad about things. If I have something, I worry that I will eventually break it, stain it or ruin it. When I got “Betty,” I traded in the BMW for a Toyota that I never had to worry about.” For awards ceremonies she favors designer Monique Lhuillier: “To have her fit a dress on you is amazing.” And she raves about Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney (“I can always tell their work. It’s very unique—sophisticated with an edge”). 

Just before she meets with a realtor to look at downtown apartments, Ferrera talks about a recent trip to Florence, addressing a theme that her words have been hinting at all afternoon—the idea of herself as a conscious creation on the brink of transformation. “I went on a tour of the Davids through the city. There’s like five different versions: the copper version, the green marble version, the waterproof version,” Ferrera explains. “We entered the museum and there’s a hall filled with unfinished rocks, body parts carved into each one. I decided that Michelangelo did not finish these pieces on purpose. You can see what this process was like for him. This agony, this pain and the beauty once it was all done. Every day I try to experience that process, chipping away the rock to find my better self, my best work or my best part.”

Photography by Eric Ogden.