Don't Read This Story!

By RICHARD CORLISS

Jaye Davidson has been "outed" by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The novice, who startled and seduced moviegoers as the enigmatic femme fatale of Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, earned a two-edged prize last week: an Oscar nomination.

The unexpected citation -- for a tender acting turn by a first-time performer in an inexpensive ($5 million) foreign movie -- thrilled Davidson. The minimoguls at Miramax, the film's U.S. distributor, might have been tickled too, since The Crying Game received five other important nominations (for best picture, actor, director, screenplay and editing), which promises that the film's domestic gross, a robust $16 million so far, could double or better. But the Miramaxers were spooked. They had helped make Davidson's identity the best-kept open secret in recent movie history. Would the ingenue's Oscar bid spoil their hiding game?

Final warning: we're about to reveal a secret of The Crying Game, and we don't want to spoil the pleasure of the uninitiated. So you who have not seen this film, turn the page, or tear it out and save it to consult later. Any cheating will be punished. No kidding. We have ways.

Davidson plays Dil, a pert London hairdresser on the brink of an affair with Fergus (Stephen Rea), an IRA man who held Dil's British lover captive in Belfast. Fergus hasn't expected to fall in love. He surely hasn't expected to find -- as the viewer does, 69 minutes into the 112-minute film -- that Dil is a man. A gay black man, pining for a gay black British soldier, yet eerily enticing to an Irish heterosexual who now has the convulsive feeling he is on the lam from himself.

The graphic unveiling of Dil's manhood elicits gasps from some moviegoers. Others -- cannier judges of such subtleties as voice timbre and wrist circumference -- smile sagely at the validation of their perspicacity. Stephen Woolley, the film's producer, theorizes that perhaps a quarter of the audience knows Dil's gender at once, another quarter suspects it, and at least half are completely in the dark. "Many," he says, "still insist that Jaye is a girl."

The sexual revelation is a dramatic stunt: Agatha Christie rewritten by Quentin Crisp. But the twist is also brilliant because it makes the relationship riper, the characters deeper. Flying in the face of every convention, the love story soars. Jordan calls his movie "a love story without sex, beyond sex. You think that love is the same thing as sex -- and it's not, is it?" Because they never do have sex, the lovers can hold on to their ideal images of each other as savior and beautiful woman. "It's my little joke about a marriage," Jordan says. "The ideal marriage!"

To marry the role of Dil with the proper actor, Jordan says, "I needed a man with a very particular kind of femininity." Davidson, who was spotted by a casting assistant at a wrap party for Derek Jarman's gay-toned Edward II, had a sad, elfin, ambiguous, direct, unique screen charisma ideal for Dil. "The only thing nonactors have to work with is themselves," says the director. "What the movie camera sees is a person's spirit. You can't hide that."

The neophyte's spirit was evident to all who worked on The Crying Game. "He's a sweet boy," Stephen Rea says, "and he was great. He-she great." Rea observed that "the men on the film crew were attracted to Jaye because he looked like their notion of a woman. They would say, 'What a pity she's not a woman' -- as if that were a failing in Jaye. Well, if you are attracted, why not deal with it? It is only a piece of meat, only flesh, and there are all varieties of flesh. If you are so inclined."

Davidson, 25, was never inclined to acting. Still isn't. The son of a white Englishwoman and a black African man, he was born in Riverside, California, but moved to Hertfordshire, England, when he was three. He worked in the British fashion industry and, as late as two months ago, had a temp job in a frock shop. His conversation is nonchalance unsullied by star ego. "I find it hard to be objective about the film," he says. "I can't see past the fact that I'm in it. I can't bear to look at myself, that's what it is. This is arrogant, but I think I look more beautiful -- if there is any beauty -- wearing jeans and a T shirt, just completely plain faced and normal, than I do in that film."

The young beauty enjoyed making The Crying Game, but has no plans to cash in on his starburst. "The more away from the norm you are," he notes, "the fewer parts there are. So I can't see myself being offered many parts. And I don't see many worth doing. It's not that I don't want to act a'tall. It's that I only want to do things I like and that I've got the specs for."

Davidson carries fame's burden with blithe grace. He is recognized "constantly. And all one can say is, 'Thank you very much.' " It may be an apt rehearsal for his next role: as a celebrity in the Oscar-night audience. Last month, after he won the National Board of Review award for Best Newcomer, he said, "I am dying to make a speech, but didn't get to." Should the Academy award him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, he might take his cue from Judy Garland in A Star Is Born: walk onto the great stage, smile regally through the tears and declare, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mr. Jaye Davidson."

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/ New York