a place in the sun; Brazilian heartthrob Rodrigo Santoro brings his smoldering sensibility to America.

Byline: Eve Macsweeney

For Rodrigo Santoro, the life of an unknown actor in Los Angeles with time on his hands is a peculiarly sweet experience. One of Brazil's most famous and prolific stars, he came over a couple of years ago to promote Behind the Sun, a beautifully filmed period drama, by the director of The Motorcycle Diaries, about a rural Brazilian family locked in a blood feud with neighboring farmers. He decided to come back and stay awhile, as much for the break-and the anonymity-as for the chance to get parts in Hollywood. (So far he's had a cameo in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and played Laura Linney's bewildered office crush in Love Actually.) "I was working in Brazil nonstop for a long time, and I really needed to get away for a bit and do my thing," he says in his fluent, lightly accented English. "I surf every day, I do yoga, I read books I've been wanting to read forever. I'm just going with the flow."

He's unlikely to remain incognito for long. Twenty-nine-year-old, six-foot-two Santoro was cast in the new multimillion-dollar campaign for Chanel No 5-a two-minute mini-movie by Baz Luhrmann, starring Nicole Kidman as a glamorous and bejeweled celebrity-that will hit movie theaters this fall. (See "Take Five," page 716.) Santoro plays a Gabriel Garcia Marquez-type fledgling writer oblivious to Kidman's fame, with whom she escapes the spotlight for a hideaway romance. He was chosen, says Luhr-

mann, because "you couldn't have a model or just a stand-in. The weight of the character of the writer defines the character that Nicole is playing."

Despite his eminent qualifications as an utterly swoonworthy heartthrob-see him squire Kate Moss in "Staying Alive," page 722-the half-Brazilian, ...