“No-Shows!” screams Taraji P. Henson from the bathroom of her hotel suite in midtown Manhattan, her outstretched arms brandishing what look like two raw, embryonic chicken cutlets. “They’re my secret weapons,” she adds with the smile of a high-wattage fluoride model, before tossing the nipple concealers onto a nearby bed. Quietly but assuredly, the 38-year-old actress has become a secret weapon in her own right, most recently in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which she plays Brad Pitt’s mother, a woman whose adopted son ages in reverse while she creeps towards death. It’s an unlikely scenario, the details of which she is quick to eschew. “When it comes to portraying characters, especially the more difficult ones, it’s like I loan out my body,” she says, her eyes two orbs of unrestrained emotion. “I become an empty vessel, as if I’m possessed, and I tell my character to guide me, to talk through me. It’s like I lock Taraji in a closet and let my body be used. It can be kind of scary, actually.”

Henson, who moved to Hollywood from Washington, D.C. in 1996, armed with a baby boy and only $700 in savings, has since built an impressive résumé with choice roles opposite red carpet veterans such as Don Cheadle, Mark Wahlberg and Terrence Howard. “I don’t know why I’ve been so lucky,” she says of her steady rise to fame. “Maybe I’m doing well because I’m such a good mom and God has decided to cut me a break. Somebody has to bring home the bacon, right?”

Photo: Victoria Will, photographed at the Empire Hotel