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"  From the moment she appears, Jessica Biel is gracefully deflecting the attention of men. Wearing Roger Vivier white pumps and snug True Religion jeans, her hair tightly pulled back in a ponytail, she walks out of the elevator in the Hotel Gansevoort in New York City&amp;#039;s Meatpacking District at a rapid clip, shedding two young men who had the incredible good luck to have ridden down with her. She nods them off nicely as they walk away grinning and no doubt mentally compiling lists of buddies who&amp;#039;ll be receiving the following text message: &amp;quot;Dude! I was just in the elevator with the sexiest woman alive!&amp;quot; Next in the gauntlet is a Moby-looking scenester with a paunch who descends upon her in Ono, the Gansevoort&amp;#039;s bustling, dimly lit Japanese restaurant, introducing himself as if he&amp;#039;s an old friend. The fact that he&amp;#039;s wielding a Treo device like a video camera goes unnoticed by Biel, who later refers to said implication as &amp;quot;creepy.&amp;quot; She dispatches him into the darkness with a tight smile and walks through the large restaurant to a back booth, causing a ripple of chopsticks to go still as heads turn. If the rhythms and rotations of the mass entertainment media complex are to be trusted, we are currently living in Jessica Biel&amp;#039;s Big Moment. After getting her foot in the door in 1996 on the show 7th Heaven, the now-25-year-old actress won the hearts and minds of the boys with her badass ability to wield a meat cleaver in the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a bow and arrow in 2004&amp;#039;s Blade: Trinity. Her turn in 2005&amp;#039;s Stealth, which bombed (literally), may have gone largely unnoticed, but the trailer highlighting Biel under a waterfall certainly didn&amp;#039;t. Then in the fall of 2005, Esquire bestowed on her the magazine&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Sexiest Woman&amp;quot; honorific. Last summer, she deftly skipped over the threshold from hottie to respectable actor with her supple performance as an early-twentieth-century duchess opposite Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti in The Illusionist and since then has become a red-carpet flashbulb magnet, wearing Valentino to the Golden Globes and, to present at the Oscars, a fuchsia halter-top Oscar de la Renta dress that strikingly revealed her toned shoulders. &amp;quot;Parts that I really want aren&amp;#039;t going to me,&amp;quot; Biel says. &amp;quot;Like The Other Boleyn Girl with Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman.&amp;quot; But she stops herself. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to say that there&amp;#039;s nothing I love that I can have. But there&amp;#039;s still the occasional script that the director doesn&amp;#039;t want to see you for. They want that top tier of girls.&amp;quot;  So, how does she go from Big Moment to top tier? Gauging from her acting heroes: Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, and Annette Bening\u00AD (with whom she will costar, along with Sean Bean, in a screen adaptation of Oscar Wilde&amp;#039;s play A Woman of No Importance), it seems she has good taste. And in addition to working with Nicolas Cage and Julianne Moore in the recent thriller Next, Biel is finally getting a turn at comedy\u2014something she&amp;#039;s been longing for\u2014opposite Adam Sandler and Kevin James in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, due out next month.  &amp;quot;Jessica is a great actress who also happens to be smart, sweet, and funny,&amp;quot; Sandler says. &amp;quot;But the best part of working with her was watching her beat Kevin James at arm wrestling.&amp;quot; Not that the movie, about two firefighters who pretend to be gay in order to claim domestic-\u00ADpartner benefits (Biel plays their lawyer), refrains from reveling in her sexiness\u2014she sheds her clothes for a gawking Sandler, and when his character first sees her, his world goes into super slow-mo.  &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s capable of attaining the Julia Roberts crown,&amp;quot; says Chuck and Larry director Dennis Dugan, referring to Biel&amp;#039;s healthy-American-girl vibe and comic timing. The actress herself is wary of such pronouncements.  &amp;quot;The scary thing about having this opportunity is that if it&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;your moment,&amp;#039; that eventually disappears,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I think about reaching for &amp;#039;the \u00ADmoment&amp;#039; but never really achieving it. That way, I&amp;#039;m always \u00ADstriving.&amp;quot;  When Biel walked onto the set of The Illusionist, director Neil Burger was impressed with her athlete&amp;#039;s readiness and resolve. She carries herself with the confidence of a dancer or an accomplished jock\u2014both of which she has been. &amp;quot;She completely gave as good as she got with her Oscar-nominated costars Norton and Giamatti,&amp;quot; Burger says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s a testament to her poise and her talent.&amp;quot; Early in the production, Biel had a scene with \u00ADNorton that put the two of them in a stream in the Czech \u00ADRepublic in March. &amp;quot;It was essentially liquid ice. It was like an electric shock, and it knocked the breath out of both of us and Jess turned blue,&amp;quot; Norton says. &amp;quot;When we watched it back on the monitor, you could see it hadn&amp;#039;t played out exactly right. Neil and I both wanted to do it again, but sometimes you have to give up perfect for safety, and we were hesitant to ask her to get back in that water. But she said, &amp;#039;It wasn&amp;#039;t right, was it? Let&amp;#039;s do it again.&amp;#039; And I thought, All right, she&amp;#039;s a pro.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;She doesn&amp;#039;t take herself too seriously,&amp;quot; says her friend and producing partner Michelle Purple. Stephen Collins, who played Biel&amp;#039;s minister father on 7th Heaven, agrees: &amp;quot;She has an incredible goof-off, tomboy streak,&amp;quot; he says.  So what was a tomboy doing in the front rows at fashion week in Paris early last March? (&amp;quot;An intimi\u00ADdating and overwhelming environment,&amp;quot; Biel says.) Scoring some clothing, including the Preen number she&amp;#039;s wearing now, and also celebrating her twenty-fifth birthday. &amp;quot;Someone said, &amp;#039;You have five years till 30.&amp;#039; I started to think, Wow, over the next five years, my life could really change personally,&amp;quot; Biel says smiling, with a slight squint of her catlike eyes.  When the tabloids started spotting Biel with Justin Timberlake in January shortly after his breakup with Cameron Diaz\u2014the two were seen snowboarding together in Park City, Utah, during the Sundance Film Festival; sharing a glass of champagne at Prince&amp;#039;s Golden Globes party; and backstage at Timberlake&amp;#039;s concert in San Diego\u2014her personal life suddenly became of great interest to the public. She dodges a probe about her relationship with Timberlake while knocking back shrimp tempura with aplomb, saying that she was in Park City with girlfriends and holding meetings for her production company, Iron Ocean Films. Nor does she want to discuss her past relationships with actors Ryan Reynolds and Chris Evans, or Yankee star Derek Jeter, quot;for no other reason than I can&amp;#039;t even go to the dry cleaner by myself anymore,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re seen in public with anybody that you might not even know, and you&amp;#039;re speculated about.&amp;quot; Asked if the constant attention makes dating hard, she says, &amp;quot;It makes everything hard because you can&amp;#039;t even go to pick up a prescription without somebody trying to snap a photo of what you have in your Longs Drugs bag. Thank goodness I&amp;#039;m a nice person,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Thank you, Mom, for teaching me that.&amp;quot;  The day after Biel was born, in Ely, Minnesota, her parents took her to a dogsled race; it was 30 \u00ADdegrees below zero. By age one she was in a canoe. Her \u00ADmother, who is &amp;quot;New Age,&amp;quot; grew up in Colorado, hunting for arrowheads as a child; her father was a &amp;quot;mountain man&amp;quot; who ran an Outward Bound school and worked as an international business consultant. His career took the family (her brother, Justin, is three years younger) from Texas to Connecticut and, \u00ADfinally, to Boulder. &amp;quot;We didn&amp;#039;t lock our doors,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;We snowboarded, hiked, climbed, rafted. We grew up without a fear of the world.&amp;quot;  Although Biel thrived at athletics, she doesn&amp;#039;t \u00ADremember a time when she wasn&amp;#039;t dancing or singing. At age 11, she signed up with a talent agency in Denver, which got her to the International Modeling and Talent Association convention in Los Angeles, which in turn got her into meetings with managers and agencies. &amp;quot;I wanted to be Whitney Houston for a long time. I would be onstage and I would just come alive,&amp;quot; Biel recalls. &amp;quot;I begged my parents to let me go out for pilot season.&amp;quot;  When she was 14, she landed her central role in 7th Heaven, playing the oldest daughter of seven kids in a wholesome Christian family. But after a few years, she wanted to mix things up personally and \u00ADprofessionally. At 17, Biel posed seductively for a Gear magazine photo shoot, topless with scant bottoms. It was a clear sign that she wanted to be off the show. &amp;quot;I was all over the place,&amp;quot; she says now. &amp;quot;I was being a rebellious teenager.&amp;quot; She feels that she was \u00ADexploited by the magazine, but 7th Heaven&amp;#039;s pro\u00ADducers cut her out of the series. (She eventually returned in a more limited role.) &amp;quot;The Gear thing, while embarrassing, wasn&amp;#039;t shy exactly bad for her career,&amp;quot; Collins says. True enough, in that between Gear and Esquire Biel worked on seven major films. But none of those movies had anywhere near the impact that taking off her clothes did. Julianne Moore says that Biel&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;extraordinary&amp;quot; beauty appears as if &amp;quot;she were carved from marble,&amp;quot; but she also has a body that you&amp;#039;d think only a comic book artist could draw\u2014curvy in just the right places\u2014and yet still healthy. Biel works out three times a week, primarily heart-rate training, doing fast-speed soccer exercises, squats, and running. She also does yoga regularly. Still, she feigns dismay at the suggestion that she looks buff. &amp;quot;What do you mean? This is the thinnest and the least muscular I&amp;#039;ve been in a long time,&amp;quot; she protests. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m so lean and feminine!&amp;quot; As we order tea after dinner, the large party of 20 at the banquet table perpendicular to ours has mostly disbanded, allowing four of the men left at the table to reshuffle themselves so that eventually they sit on one side, facing her. It&amp;#039;s as if they&amp;#039;re at dinner theater. Biel may feel she has yet to land the role that breaks her out, but until that time, she has no shortage of fans who will be happy to watch her along the way. When asked to go bowling two days later, after her ELLE photo shoot, Biel scarcely raises an eyebrow. She throws on a black ensemble and arrives ready to roll at Chelsea Piers between two lanes of shy, bouncy seven-year-old girls. Despite doing pretty poorly, losing for eight frames, she pulls a spare, a strike, and two nines at the very end to win the contest. &amp;quot;I was really sucking, but I&amp;#039;m a closer,&amp;quot; she says gamely. &amp;quot;You should see me at beer pong.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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