I told Benjamin Bratt I'd write a good article. "Of course," I assure him, as I hear his amusement over the phone. Almost two weeks after Texas's recent torrential rainstorms, Ben sits alone in his motel room, decorated in "tasteful mauve and magenta tones," some 1000 miles away from the glitz, glamour, and bullshit of Hollywood.

"Your basic motel-on-the-highway," he says of his current home-away-from-home in the small town of Del Rio, where Bad Girls was also shot. After weeks of filming Aaron Spelling's latest miniseries, Texas, based on the James Michener novel, Ben casually hangs on this Sunday. TODAY IS HIS DAY OFF…

"You know, it's late," he interrupts after a solid hour has passed. "I have to have a conference call with my brother and producer."

"Well," I tell him. "I'm done with you anyway.

August marks the release of his seventh feature, the Harrison Ford action thriller, Clear and Present Danger. At the end of September audiences will spot the Latino on screen again, this time with co-star Meryl Streep, in Universal's much-anticipated The River Wild. On the day that he is supposed to be relaxing, Ben is already working on his next project, a unique feature film written by older brother Peter, called Follow Me Home.

So, I muse, the busy actor is probably not thinking twice about where I'm going to go with this story, and it's safer for him that his mind is on other things. Because when he finds out that I got ahold of Robert G. Egan, Jane Ridley and Stanley Glenn several days after the two of us last spoke, I sense that the 30-year-old will be surprised, but also rather eager to hear what they have to say.

"I want to write the names of those titles you gave me again," Stanley Glenn politely asks, ready to list Ben's latest film credits. "… all except for Demolition Man."

"Well, you can fast-forward it, now that it's on video," I suggest. "One of his big movies that's out now is called Blood In Blood Out. It's rather long, but he's one of the main characters, and he's very good."

"Okay… what was the movie he was in with Michael Keaton?"

"Oh, One Good Cop."

"Let me write that down, because I can get that... Okay…?

Glenn knew Bratt during his four years at the University of California, Santa Barbara, taught him in advanced acting classes, and directed him in several productions. Now retired, he relaxes this Friday evening, and chats casually and openly about his former pupil. "All I knew is that with that voice, that physique, and those looks, the potential was enormous, and it would depend on how much he could grow," Glenn begins, recalling Bratt's performance in the Greek tragedy, Hecuba. "He had a lot of growing to do and it was a very tough start for him, but he worked so hard and so well."

"He was an extremely likable, very bright young man, and his talent was very clear in the productions he did with us," says Robert G. Egan, another UCSB drama professor. "He was also very disciplined and organized in terms of the way he went about pursuing his art and pursuing his studies, a very solid person and a real standout as an actor at a young age. One had the sense—well, we produced some pretty talented students, and we produced some pretty deserving students, but talent and deserve don't always go together. They definitely did in his case."

When Benjamin Bratt was a boy, acting wasn't on his list of "Things to Be." What was? "Race car driver, fireman, Speed Racer's older brother," he tells me, half-serious. "I wanted to be him… I wanted to be Ultraman." But those, he says, were just boyhood fantasies. In high school, athletics held sway. He was co-captain of the wrestling team, swam, and played baseball. Sports absorbed him until his senior year, when something happened.

"I happened to mention to my father they were casting for the school play—it was Destry Rides Again, that's what it was. He had said, 'Why don't you go out for it?' because, you see, my grandfather was an actor, his father was an actor with the Grand Street Follies on Broadway, and I said, 'Nooo, acting's for… sissies, for girls and sissies.' I was really adamant about not going in, so the way he convinced me to do it was, he said, 'Listen, I took drama when I was in high school, and what I discovered was that that's where all the pretty young ladies were.' So with that, I went to the audition. And I was lucky enough to get one of the lead roles."

It is almost too amusing to think that the reason Benjamin Bratt decided to "do the acting thing" was because he could get some. He laughs when I announce to him, "BRATT WENT INTO ACTING TO GET LAID," joking as if reading some big Hard Copy headline.

"That happened to be a by-product of it," he joins in my amusement. "No . . . I'm kidding. No it was really funny because if that was the initial draw, I ended up finding something completely different. Yes, it's true, there are beautiful women in the theater, in the acting profession, but I finally discovered something that spoke more to me than sports. I stumbled upon this acting thing, and it just seemed to work for me.

Majoring in drama at UCSB, Bratt excelled in his craft, graduating with honors in 1986. Jane Ridley, who taught him during the fall of 1985 and winter of 1986, and is currently at the University of Pennsylvania, remembers an inherent uniqueness. "I don't know if it was true or not, Ridley says, "but he was at a school that has a reputation of being one of the bigger party schools in California, and he wasn't a partier. He was incredibly focused on what he wanted to do, and that's obviously one of the reasons why he made it through the whole BFA [Bachelor of Fine Arts] program, because it's a selective program. Also, I suspect it's one of the reasons that he's still working."

After completing his undergraduate degree, Bratt entered the Master's program at San Francisco's prestigious American Conservatory Theater. "I was confident enough to know that in school, I could probably make a living at being an actor, but with a Master's degree in my back pocket, I was also assured that I could teach. There's a part of me that's always wanted to be a teacher, a teacher of acting. At one time—and this was more of a grownup decision of mine, in my teen years—I wanted to be a physical education coach, and I guess that sort of came out of my respect for my coaches. I think that being on a team, playing on a team sport, does a lot for your socialization skills, making you a better person. It sounds kind of corny, but I really believe that. But looking back, it wouldn't be a challenge enough, it wouldn't be thrilling enough. I'm not putting that profession down. I have all respect for coaching, but I'm a thrill seeker, I really am, and part of that goes hand in hand with what I do—I don't know from one day to the next what I'll be doing, and I kind of thrive on that."

At the moment, Bratt's plans are set. On August 12, we'll see him with Harrison Ford as Captain Ramirez, head of Special Forces, in Philip Noyce's adaptation of Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger. "It's the third installment of the Jack Ryan [Ford] saga, so it's got a built-in audience. It's going to be huge, I think," Bratt says. "We go down to Colombia to infiltrate the territory of the drug cartels, conduct a reconnaissance mission, and eventually destroy a certain clandestine drug lab, and while we're down there, something goes wrong. We end up getting captured, and some of us get killed."

So . . . does Captain Ramirez get killed?

"I will not say," he responds with a tease. "And the kicker is that Jack Ryan, a non-soldier, comes down and out-soldiers the top soldiers. He rescues us—but that's because he's a movie star," he adds, "You're not in too bad of company if you're getting rescued by Harrison Ford." Bratt also stars in another highly anticipated feature, the suspenseful action-adventure The River Wild, with Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon. "We were supposed to shoot in two different places." he says. " I went up to Oregon to Grants Pass to rehearse for a week, and came back. Then we went out to Montana and did some actual shooting there. At one point, we were supposed to have a huge company move and shoot some additional stuff of mine in Oregon, but it didn't work out that way. Apparently, there was an environmental group. They were protesting our presence there, citing that we were damaging trees, so I ended up doing all of my work in Libby, which was sad, because I have family up in Oregon, and I had wanted to see them again. But apparently the movie is pretty damned good, and they're waiting until September to release it so it doesn't get lost in the summer fray. "I play Ranger Johnny, who has known Meryl Streep's character for years. They have not been in touch, but she used to babysit him. He tries to warn her about going down a particular stretch of river.

But of course, she goes.

"But of course," he coyly replies, "we don't know what happens until we see it, do we?"

After completing his work in Texas, as the fictional vaquero, Benito Garza, who offers the Mexican point of view during the colonization of the Lone Star State, Bratt returns to L.A., where he begins work as Abel, whom he describes as "a goateed, tattooed, balding base-head" in his brother's film, Follow Me Home. "He's a racist and a misogynist," Bratt adds, a definite stretch from his "more normal" characters.

Follow Me Home is a contemporary allegory with a very urban twist, says Bratt. "It is about four uniquely different muralists who set out on a cross country road trip to repaint the White House. Their idea, their hope, is to get there and put the images of their people, their colors, up on the White House. Of course, that's their goal, and we as an audience never see them actually achieve that. I liken them to the Knights of the Round Table who are in pursuit of the Holy Grail. They never actually found the Holy Grail, but what they found was a truer voice, a more honest voice within themselves, and that's what happens to our heroes. While on this road trip, they might never achieve their goal, but what they do achieve is a clear understanding of not only themselves, but the people they are traveling with and what the society in the United States is actually like... It has a different voice than most films you see. It has a new perspective, a perspec-tive that is rarely seen or heard—certainly in American cinema.

Obviously, with a movie holding such a powerful message, Bratt has some strong feelings about the status of Latinos, and minorities in general, in entertainment today, and he openly vents his frustrations. "I believe that the industry has yet to really acknowledge or even realize that economically speaking, there's a sleeping giant out there," Bratt begins. "What's the number one radio station in Los Angeles? It's a Spanish-speaking, Latino music-oriented station—the most listened to station in Southern California. What does that tell you? That tells you that there's a huge market out there, and that Hollywood has not really investigated the different avenues that can be taken to reach that market. I think that if there was more interest in presenting the perspectives and the ideas of the Latino culture, then you would have more of a success in tying Latino audiences into the movie houses. It's been very Eurocentric in nature so far in the history of the U.S. cinema, and the perspectives have been very limited, the stories of our people have not been explored, and there's a rich history there. When they are explored, it seems that they are always explored in a historical context, like Texas, for example, but there's a lot of good contemporary stories out there.

"I'm waiting for the day to come when you will have a Latino or an Asian person or an African-American playing a doctor, or a lawyer, or any professional role—or any person in society—without ever pointing out their skin color or their ethnicity. I would love for that day to come, the idea of blind casting is truly a reality," Bratt continues. "I trained at the A.C.T., where during one year, they put on a production of A Christmas Carol. Tiny Tim was played by a Chinese-American boy, and his mother was played by an African-American woman. No one ever said anything about it. The audiences weren't thrown off by it at all, and it never came into question. It just was, and that's the beautiful thing about the world of theater. It's not like that yet in the movie world, but hopefully it will be. And I really believe it's just a matter of time. You've had various actors knock down those walls, but it shouldn't really be up to the actors to do it, it should be up to the people who make the decisions to make the films, and it's just a matter of time, I think. I'm really optimistic about it," Bratt speculates.

"His films that are coming out this summer should be good," I tell Stanley Glenn as he adds Benjamin Bratt's newest films to his now updated movies-to-see list. "One's a Harrison Ford movie that comes out in August, and the other's a Meryl Streep—he's going to be in The River Wild."

"Oh, gooood... Is that the Meryl Streep?" Glenn asks, just to double-check.

"Yeah," I pause as I hear him pen this title down. "I think that's released in September, and then Clear and Present Danger."

"Clear and Present..." he hesitates, "...is that the TV series?"