"I got spotted on the street. I auditioned. I worked on it for four days," Dawson recalled of the film to HuffPost Live on Tuesday, Oct. 1. At just 15, Dawson acted in the controversial Larry Clark film that centered on New York teenagers (at least one of them knowingly HIV-positive) doing drugs and having unprotected sex. But, as Dawson pointed out, her character Ruby wasn't someone she could relate to at the time.
"I didn't even have sex until I was 20," the 10 Years star admitted. "My mom was a teenage mom, I was deathly afraid of being a teenage mom."
And as for the film's uncomfortable sex scenes, it surprisingly didn't alarm her parents one bit! "With all the insanity that my character goes through, the only thing they cared about was not smoking," she joked.
Though the stunning actress didn't mind sharing her sexual awakening, Dawson would later down the road keep tight-lipped about several of her romances after the mid-90s project. The Chavez star was briefly linked to Joshua Jackson in 2002 and split from French DJ Mathieu Schreyer in 2011 after three years together. She would later date Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle for eight months before splitting in December 2012.