Modest ’Hoo

In May, she graduated. In June, she got married. By September, she had landed herself a role in a Columbia Pictures flick with Ed Harris and Cuba Gooding Jr.

This is Sarah Drew (Drama ’02). She’s 22. If you’re getting an inferiority complex reading this, well, you’d be justified.

“I know, it’s crazy!” she said of her success thus far in an industry not known for kind breaks. She was speaking just hours before a Friday night performance of “Vincent in Brixton.”

Oh right, that’s the other thing: While filming aforementioned movie, “Radio,” she scored a big part in a major Broadway play. That’s right. Not off-off-Broadway. The real thing.

The five-person show, now closed, focuses on the travails of artist Vincent Van Gogh while he was living in Brixton, England. In the play, Drew is the daughter of the woman who runs the boarding house in which Van Gogh lodges.

“It’s really not so much about him, but about love, depression and sex,” she said. “It’s fascinating.”

Ever since a kindergarten graduation performance, Drew said, she knew she wanted to act. Throughout her childhood, she was involved in all kinds of school plays and even some summer stock work where she grew up on Long Island. In high school, she landed a gig on the MTV cartoon drama, “Daria,” doing the voice of a teeny-bopper fashion fiend, a job she described as unglamorous but fun.

At the University, she immersed herself in drama department offerings and performed in plays while taking classes in other areas. She missed the start of fall semester her final year to play Juliet — “completely enchanting in a never-to-be-forgotten balcony scene,” according to a New York Times critic — at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J.

“I wanted to get a liberal arts education, not just acting. Besides, I really feel that by just doing shows, I grew a lot as an actor,” she said.

(Did we mention she graduated Phi Beta Kappa?)

Drew spent 11 weeks last summer in South Carolina, filming “Radio,” a movie about the complex friendship between a high school football coach (Harris) and a mentally handicapped man named Radio (Gooding), who is obsessed with, you guessed it, radios.

Drew plays the daughter of the football coach, and the nuances of their uncommunicative father-daughter relationship are sorted out in the movie’s subplot, she said.

In the midst of the showbiz whirlwind, Drew seems centered and calm. She and her husband, Peter Lanfer (a non-Hoo), live in New Haven, Conn., where Lanfer is a doctoral student at Yale.

It’s about an hour-and-45-minute trek by train to New York City, where she performs, but Drew said she doesn’t mind it.

She’s close with the cast of “Vincent in Brixton,” but most of her friends are of the non-actor variety, she said.

“I think the biggest piece [of advice] is really needing to have a life outside of it,” she said. “There are so many voices of people either telling you you’re fabulous or you suck, and it can be incredibly damaging. My career is part of my life, but it’s not my life.”

If you want to catch this modest Hoo on the big screen, “Radio” comes out in October.