`Wood' Groom Grooved From Nerd To Beefcake

MOVIES

Looking at handsome, hardbodied Taye Diggs today, it's hard to believe he was a nerd in high school.

He swears he was, though. Subtract some extra pounds of muscle, add thick black glasses with tape on the sides, and that was him.

``I had no friends,'' he says. ``Girls laughed at me. I was never picked for any sports team.''

The girls stopped laughing some time back. As Diggs relaxes in a suite at a Los Angeles hotel, the lobby below is filled with a swarm of women who've gathered in hopes of catching a glimpse of the man who gave Angela Bassett a whole new angle on life in last summer's How Stella Got Her Groove Back and gave this year's Go some of its go.

If they get that glimpse, they won't be disappointed. Biceps bulge from Diggs' black T-shirt. His waist narrows as if it had been created by a Disney animator. His hair is cut centimeters from his scalp to frame a face that makes women melt.

It's the body of a man recently named by People magazine as one of its ``Sexiest People Alive.'' But inside, Diggs insists, still lurks the shy, insecure youth he was.

``As a former nerd, it was a strange moment for me when People magazine called to say that you are one of the most beautiful humans on the planet,'' Diggs recalls. ``I had a good laugh about it, but it was also gratifying on another level.

``I've gone from nerd to sexiest man alive,'' the actor says, laughing. ``There are days when you want to go back to that high school, find your former tormentors and say, `OK, do you want to re-evaluate?'''

Needless to say, it's all Stella's fault.

``It's funny,'' he says, ``but for the first time in my life, brothers come up to me and say, `Taye, you've made my life miserable with this movie. You were so sensitive and my girl-friend thinks you're the perfect man. I can't measure up.'''

They can relax, though. In The Wood, opening today, Diggs is anything but perfect, especially where women are concerned. His character is a yuppie sort who bails out on the day of his wedding. Suffering a bad case of prewedding jitters, he joins his best friends (Omar Epps and Richard T. Jones) to look back on their past relationships with women, their families and each other in a series of flashbacks.

Diggs was offered a slew of scripts after Stella, but The Wood was a natural, he says.

``I had a very easy time with this character because I related to his situation of being at an age where you're making major life decisions,'' Diggs says.

``It was good for me to participate in this flick,'' he adds, ``because it made me realize you can really, truly, always have a good time on a film set. I didn't necessarily have a great time filming Stella or Go.''

Which isn't to say, he hastens to add, that he didn't like the people he was working with.

``I just found that these movies required a different style of acting - it wasn't very loose,'' he says. ``On The Wood, it wasn't even acting. It was more like hanging out.''

The chemistry among the three buddies clicked almost immediately, he adds. He recalls a scene in which his character strips naked and uses a garden hose to shower off before his wedding.

Yes, Stella fans, it's another chance to see Diggs in the altogether.

``I wanted it to be me in that scene. I'm not at the point where I would ask for a butt double,'' he says, laughing. ``I don't believe in star trips.''

On the day the scene was shot, however, he arrived to find Epps and Johnson also in the buff - a detail not called for in the script.

``We wanted to provide a little support for our brother,'' Epps said in a separate interview. ``We didn't want the women to think that Taye was the only beefcake in this film.''