Heather Graham, it seems, is the perfect combo of naughty and nice.

Adrift in Manhattan director Alfredo De Villa tells Radar he met with 20 actresses for the lead role of an eye doctor whose child had died, and "there was just something maternal about [Graham]."

And something not-so-motherly, too. (Spoiler alert!)

"There's one particular sex scene that contextually is hard to take; it's not explicit—it's tastefully done. I guess they felt it would be strong as is, rather than try to fix it for the rating boards," De Villa says of the film, which opens Friday. "It's a scene with Heather's character, Rose, and Victor Rasuk's character, Simon. They ... go up to Heather's room, and they start, sort of, play acting their needs to each other. And at some point they're totally naked and Victor starts hitting her while they're making love." De Villa says it's a key scene to the plot. "We're following her story throughout the film and we finally get a sense of why she's behaving a certain way; it crystallizes a lot of what she's been doing."

Graham's been taking a decidedly gritty turn. In another forthcoming film, Broken, she plays a character straight out of a Guns 'N' Roses video who goes to L.A. to be a rock star and ends up in a relationship with a heroin addict. (She even shot a rock video for the film that's making the rounds on YouTube, above). As for the heroin addiction, she revealed, "I thought about how I felt addicted in my own life to certain other things, not to drugs. I related to the addiction and I did a lot of research—talked to people and read about it," Graham tells Radar.

She wouldn't elaborate on those certain other things she felt addicted to in her own life.