If this looker looks familiar, then you’ve probably seen a movie or two before. Action!

You video chicks could learn a thing or three from 22-year-old actress Tawny Dahl. While still in high school, the Venice, Calif., native discovered a way to triple the amount of money her job paid for doing a third of the labor—by modeling in rap videos. The twist is that she used the rappers to blow up instead of vice versa.

After quitting her J.O.B. to floss her curves in videos for Jay-Z’s “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me)” and Nelly’s “Batter Up” and “Ride Wit Me,” love got serious about her career (say it with me, girls: kuh-rear) as an actress. She landed commercials for Nike, Pepsi and IKEA and eventually scored a major role in John Singleton’s movie Baby Boy. She’ll occasionally drop in a video here and there but only if it’s a big look.

She let Lloyd Banks fans drool over her in the “On Fire” vid and played the beauty to Ludacris’ Fat Bastard alter ego in the “Number One Spot” joint. “When they called me for the video and told me what the scene was, I was like, ‘Oh, definitely!’ Plus, they pay a lot more now that I have [movies under my belt]. A lot, a lot, a lot more” [Laughs].

For Tawny, the Luda video is a 360 after a triumphant few years in Hollywood. She has been in a number of independent movies, had a sizable role in Spike Lee’s Showtime movie Sucker Free City and can be seen in Queen Latifah’s Beauty Shop. But it would’ve all been just a dream had the golden-brown treat not had the chance to seduce Tyrese’s character in Baby Boy with her bite-size lips and pussycat eyes.

“That’s not really my personality, so [that role] was a little uncomfortable for me,” she admits. “I’m always uncomfortable with kissing scenes. Last year I did a movie with Mack 10, Clifton Powell and Michael Rapaport called It Ain’t Easy…and I actually played a hooker. But it was so much easier, ’cause I didn’t have any [love] scenes. It was just assumed you knew what I was.”

It’s not just pretending to kiss below the belt in movies that sparks Tawny’s discomfort. She is indeed sensitive about putting her lips on other lips in front of the camera. “Kissing to me is almost just as personal as sex,” she reveals. “I’m a passionate person, and kissing, I feel, is meant to be a passionate thing.”

Since Ms. Dahl hasn’t found that Mr. Right she’s looking for (“I like a guy’s swagger”), she has been relegated to practicing her second passion: rapping, a love of hers that she’s recently brought out of hiding. “I’ve been rhyming since junior high, but I’ve always been focused on acting ’cause… I guess Queen Latifah broke this [barrier], but when you’re a hip-hop artist, you’re really not taken seriously in acting, so I let that slip aside. But in the last year things have been poppin’ off, and then Universal [signed my label, Green Up, to a distribution deal], so it’s meant to be. I’m not gonna shortchange my talent for what’s right to everybody else.”

There seems to be little at which Tawny can’t succeed. Now, if only she could find Mr. Swagger. Lord knows what she’d do to him with the cameras off