Nia Long’s Got It Made in America : Hit Film and Soap Opera Success Have the Actress ‘Walking on Clouds’

NEW YORK —  With a hit summer movie and a hot soap romance, Nia Long has good reason to be, as she says, “walking on clouds”--especially when she reflects on the determination it took to make it out of her childhood neighborhood near South-Central Los Angeles.

“I’ve seen the worst and I’ve seen the best so I can relate to all types of people and characters,” says Long, who plays Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson’s daughter-by-way-of-a-sperm-bank in “Made in America” and college student Kat Speakes on the CBS soap “Guiding Light.”

“At a young age, I was very serious about becoming successful and making things better for my mom,” says Long, an only child whose mother taught art classes at senior citizens’ centers and prisons. “She sacrificed everything so that I could study whatever I wanted--acting, gymnastics, guitar, ballet, tap.”

Sipping tea in a Manhattan conference room, the 22-year-old actress speaks with the poise of someone much older, frequently referring to herself in the third person: (“Nia was being hard on Nia”). Yet her outfit, a traffic-stopping black leather bustier and ripped jeans topped by a black leather vest, is youthful and fun. “I’ve always been a focused, hard-working person, but when I get together with my friends, we act crazy,” she insists, flashing the bright smile that charmed so many critics who reviewed “Made in America.”

Long broke into films as Brandy, the good girl in “Boyz N the Hood.” Before John Singleton’s movie about life in L.A.’s inner city become a surprise hit, she signed on at “Guiding Light.” There she drifted for a year before being paired with Monti Sharp, the Daytime Emmy winner who plays Kat’s first love.

After seven cross-country auditioning trips, she won the role in “Made in America,” holding her own alongside Goldberg, Danson and co-star Will Smith. (For the record and in spite of the tabloids, Long swears she never suspected that Goldberg and Danson’s kisses were anything more than good acting.)

“Working on a film is such a high,” Long says of the pampering and relatively relaxed pace. Television, on the other hand, she says, “keeps you disciplined. You have to get to your emotions fast.”

Brushing aside speculation that her movie success may have helped nudge Kat off the “Guiding Light” back burner, Long says: “There are at least 30 characters on the show and some very good actors. The producers and writers make their decisions based on ratings and what they feel the viewers want. So I just say, ‘Hey, if they give me something, I’ll do the best I can.’ The soap is really a training ground’--it gives me the chance to get comfortable with those loves scenes that drive me nuts.”

Since moving to New York two years ago for “GL,” Long has become closer to her father, a poet who lives in New Jersey. She recently finished co-writing a screenplay, based on their relationship, about a man “who has to learn the hard way that before you can revolutionize the world, you have to look inward and work on self,” she says.

“Black people tend to blame outside circumstances for our hardships, and yeah, there have been some really funky things that have gone down in our history. But the only way to change things is to stop blaming others and deal with self.”

While agreeing that “Made in America” paints a decidedly rosier view of race relations that “Boyz N the Hood,” Long says she found truth in both movies.

“I grew up seven blocks away from where we filmed ‘Boyz N the Hood,’ so that was my reality. I’ve had friends who were killed in drug-related incidents and drive-bys, and if my mother hadn’t been behind me, I’d probably still be living there. In a picture like ‘Made in America,’ which is more mainstream, the issue is not really race. It’s relationships and the love and support that are so important from family.”