"It was surreal.  It was a trip," says actor Benjamin Bratt about his recent stint on Celebrity Jeopardy.  With a season co-starring on NBC's critically acclaimed crime drama Law & Order under his belt, and a starring role in the new independent film Follow Me Home, the cool, devastatingly handsome actor stood at the podium with buzzer in hand.

"I remember the first question I got wrong.  I spun out...I remember thinking, 'God, that was a stupid response.'  It took me two or three questions to connect the fact that I was on Jeopardy!  The think was going so fast...And at one point I was thinking in my brain, damn! I'm on Jeopardy man!  And I had to jump back in my body and then continue on."

Despite his out-of-body game show experience, $10,000 went to the charity of his choice:  the in-house substance abuse recovery program of the American Indian Friendship House Association in San Francisco (his brother Peter Bratt is a board member).  "I saw it as a real good opportunity to help them out."

Bratt's been connected with the Bay area Native community since AIM's occupation of Alcatraz in 1969—he was five.  "My mother heard an impassioned Native man (from AIM) on the local PBS station."  His mother then called the station, got a hold of the man and in reference to their motto:  'Indians of all tribes unite' asked him, "I'm South American Indian.  Does that count?"  And he said "Come on down."  "The next day," Bratt says, "we got on a speedboat and bounced out to Alcatraz Island.  That led to her and our involvement in the Indian community for the rest of our lives.  I was raised less a Latino than an Indian person."

"My heritge and how I want to portray it—I really began to take that into my own hands in the last five years,"  says Bratt.  In fact, Law & Order's Executive Producer Dick Wolf's only requirement for Bratt's new character Detective Reynaldo "Rey" Curtis, was that he be "morally righteous and young."  When he arrived on the show, "I thought it was a great opportunity to represent someone of a bicultural heritage, like myself," says Bratt.

Bratt, in cahoots with the show's producers and writers, gave Detective Curtis his own mixed-race Anglo/South American Native heritage.  But he also gave Curtis a North American Indian wife.  "It's all back-story," says Bratt,  "but in the first few episodes there were comments about it. They were always very subtle—there was an episode that my partner Briscoe makes a comment to me 'This witness was like a wooden Indian.'  The he says 'Uh, sorry, Rey'."  When asked how does his character afford to dress so well on a detective's salary, he laughs and says, "My wife's family is from a tribe that owns a casino."

When he accepted the Law & Order role, Bratt had just finished filming Follow Me Home written and directed by his brother Peter Bratt.  The film explores stereotypes, racism and dysfunctional behavior that often plagues urban minority communities.  "The entire project was a labor of love for my brother and myself."  Despite an acceptance into the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, and visible stars like Alfre Woodard, Bratt, and Jesse Borrego in the cast, finding a distributor was not easy.  "We had learned early on that Hollywood in general wasn't interested in producing Native American stories in a contemporary vein.  We realized early on that we'd have to do it ourselves if it was going to be done at all."

Despite their struggle, New Millenia Films, LLC is distributing the film in limited release—with a grassroots marketing strategy.  In fact, the founder of New Millenia Films, Henri Norris, created the company "specifically to distribute this film, because we thought it was so important—it deals with internalized racism that is seldom portrayed on the big screen."

Bratt wrapped his second season of Law & Order a few weeks ago and just returned to his home in NYC from a visit to the Pine Ridge reservation.  Next he's off on a solo trip to Indosesia before beginning filming again in July.

As for the future, Bratt has "another year as per my contract with Law & Order...and my brother is writing our next film.  It's called Baker's Dozen, and it's a modern re-telling of the passion of Jesus Christ and the disciples.  It takes place in the most down and out, drug-addicted, prostituted area of San Francisco, The Tenderloin.  Alfre Woodard is going to play Mary Magdalene and I'm going to be one of the twelve disciples."