SAN FRANCISCO””At 5-3 and tucked neatly into a pink, spaghetti-strapped frock and five-inch white heels, Jenna Dewan is sugar, spice, and everything nice and dainty, no? Yeah, right. Exhibit A suggesting otherwise is the scene in her new movie, Step Up, in which the petite 25-year-old, playing Nora, a prima ballerina attending a performing-arts school, catches a male dancer with nary a muffled oomph. Surely the man was a computer-generated image. Or on wires? Or something.

“No, I did it all myself! But, please, he was like 100 pounds!”  Dewan exclaimed, laughing, when the Georgia Straight met her last month. “So it was easy for me. At that time we were training so hard I was a lot stronger, so I could do it.” 

Dewan rehearsed 10 hours each day for three months to perfect the film's meld of classical, modern, jazz, and hip-hop choreography. When it came time to shoot, however, the avowed Dirty Dancing fan (“I love that they did their own dancing” ) said that most of her nonverbal performance was freestyling. Dewan and dance go back two decades. The daughter of a “Jane Fonda aerobics freak”  who kitted her out in her first unitard at age five, the Connecticut-born, Texas-raised Dewan started her training early, studying ballet, jazz, hip-hop, and clogging. Countless music videos followed, and she later toured as a backup hoofer for Janet Jackson and P. Diddy. Earlier this year, she appeared with Antonio Banderas in Take the Lead.

In veteran choreographer Anne Fletcher's directorial debut, Dewan's character exhibits as much emotional as physical might. After her regular partner is injured, she stubbornly forms an alliance with the unlikely Tyler (Channing Tatum), a street-taught dancer. When Tyler threatens to mess up her dream, the ambitious dancer will have none of it. Nora's rage didn't seem coaxed out of Dewan by her director.

“It comes easy,”  Dewan admitted, laughing. “I guess I consider myself a sweet person, but I've always had a very fiery, snappy thing because I know what I want. To me, knowing what you want is really being a good professional woman.” 

Dewan hopes that girls watching Step Up will relate to and be empowered by her character's independent streak.

“I really, really hope that they can see a real person in Nora and go, 'Wow! She knows what she wants, she goes for it, she has dreams, she has a vision, she has morals that she lives up to.' I want kids to have that. You know yourself so well that the drugs and the drinking and the bad boys go second to going after what you want.” 

The actor-dancer keeps her own counsel now, but it wasn't always that way. “The worst advice I was given,”  she said, “was someone told me that I should do more sexy men's magazines with little to nothing on so I could get a fan base. And I was like, 'That's not me, though.'?”  Step Up, featuring Dewan catching the guys her own way, sometimes literally, opens in Vancouver next Friday (August 11).