If YOU didn't know that the woman playing the role of simple, vulnerable May in the civil rights movement drama "The Secret Life of Bees" isn't Southern, you wouldn't guess it. But then, if you had only seen her playing Don Cheadle's wife in "Hotel Rwanda," you'd think she was African. Yet to hear her tell it, stage-trained Londoner Sophie Okonedo barely knows what she's doing.

"You never really know what's going to work for you," she said by phone from London, in her lilting accent. "I don't have a set way of doing things, other than reading the script a lot of times and never going too far away from it. I'm amazed when I read how much actors do. I wonder, is it true, are they really doing that, or is the film company saying that?" She laughs in wonder. "How they do six months living the life of a doctor, doing operations at the end of it," she said, "and you think, 'Did they?' "

Okonedo had been intrigued with "The Secret Life of Bees" since her agent gave her the Sue Monk Kidd novel a couple of years ago. In the story, three idiosyncratic African American sisters (played in the film by Queen Latifah, Okonedo and Alicia Keys) in 1964 South Carolina take in a young white girl (Dakota Fanning) and her black caretaker (Jennifer Hudson) on the run from the girl's abusive father and the racist establishment in their hometown. A year ago, she heard that director Gina Prince-Bythewood wanted her to play the kind-hearted but uncontrollably emotional sister May, "which was good, because when I read the book I thought that's certainly the part that I was interested in.

"I didn't have a clue how to play her, I think," Okonedo said, laughing at herself. "I didn't have a clue how to start it. And also I thought there are probably lots of actresses who can do the other parts better than me; I'm quite a character actress, let's play something I'm more likely to get cast in anyway.

"May lost a twin sister when she was 14, 15, and she's never been quite the same since. She's like playing someone with all your skin peeled off, all your nerves right on the edge. She feels everything very, very strongly. She gets hysterically happy. If something makes her a bit sad, it's life or death all the time."

Despite her amazement at the immersion methods of some, Okonedo is hardly averse to research.

"I found this website, I don't remember what it's called, it's a twin bereavement website -- people post letters about losing twins, what it felt like," she said. "Some said they felt like they'd lost half of themselves, talked about losing half their souls."