The answer, for all of you who are wondering, is eight hours a week. That’s how Angela Bassett has achieved those muscles and curves. Also, sorry to tell, she seems to have a gargantuan dose of near-perfect genes. And when she is preparing for a role, the workouts get a little more intense. Especially if the role requires her to spend most of her time making love to a younger man and strolling the Jamaican sands in a revealing wardrobe.

What she most wanted to show in her new movie, “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” was not her toned body but a softer, thoughtful, even silly version of herself. Not the Angela Bassett of “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” and “Waiting to Exhale” — of ultimatums, hysteria and heartbreak.

“It gave me an opportunity to play a few more delicate notes. I usually do difficult roles. It gave me a chance to do some lighter moments,” says Bassett of the romantic tale about a modern woman with well-worn degrees in both business and love.

This is not to say Bassett, whose rages resonate with every woman who couldn’t find the words to tell someone to get lost, is about to leap into comedy. “I am so much the drama queen,” she says. “So I don’t think that I am funny on screen. It is such a difficult thing to be genuinely funny on screen, which is why I appreciated so much the scenes with Whoopi. But I didn’t spend too much time sitting around thinking, How can I make this funny?’ My thought is always How can I make this honest?’ ”

For the uninitiated, the film — which opened Friday and is an adaptation of Terry McMillan’s mega-novel — follows Stella, 40, a successful stockbroker and single mother who needs to have a little fun. Whoopi Goldberg plays a friend, Delilah, who convinces her that the beach in Jamaica is an antidote to her stress. Almost immediately Stella falls into the arms of the charming and handsome Winston (the beguiling Taye Diggs), who has just passed 20. Once she is snared, Stella has to justify her infatuation and her decisions to her family, and almost everyone else.

In McMillan’s book, the romance and the reaction are played out on two levels: what Stella actually says aloud and the conversation she has with her conscience. One of the tricks of the movie is having Goldberg’s character magnified from a passing reference into a strong presence who articulates many of the outrageous, internal thoughts.

“Well, in the book she is dead,” says Bassett, in a deadpan that shows the lingering influence of Goldberg. “Delilah’s character and the relationship between Stella and Delilah provides a great deal of the humor. She added the life.”

Bassett, inhabiting just the corner of a formal chair in a Four Seasons dining room, is incessantly tapping her two-tone shoe against the chair facing her. It provides a beat, an improvised noise that stretches out the soft notes of her controlled, hushed voice.

She has impossibly ironed-out cheeks, and long brown arms that are chiseled like the indentations in a Waterford vase. Her petite curviness even comes through her loose, mannish beige suit. And in another bit of unfairness, Bassett will be 40 this month.

In this movie — even more than in her dominance as Tina Turner in “What’s Love,” and as the jilted Bernadine in “Exhale” — the camera consummates its love affair with Bassett. It lingers on the seduction in her smile, her cautionary gestures, her athletic yet coy walk, the intimate planes of her eyelids as she kisses. It has found the delicacy beneath the muscles, just as the camera once caught the steel and softness of Ingrid Bergman, Dorothy Dandridge, Ava Gardner and Lena Horne.

“Well, I like that. I can’t take issue with that,” she says of the comparison. She moves her casual, shoulder-length auburn hair slightly and presses together her lips. “I remember that Warren Beatty told me I needed to be photographed beautifully in the old Hollywood movie style,” she says. As she describes his take on her, she looks slightly embarrassed, as if she wants to recall the words that could be interpreted as vain or Hollywood-elitist. She decides to use the thought as a way to get back to Stella. “Perhaps in that you see what Winston sees in her, perhaps you see the beauty of a mature woman, the confidence and maturity.”

Yet she only displayed so much in this story about a hot romance with lovemaking under mosquito nets. “I told them I would not take my clothes off — I would not take all my clothes off nor would I have a body double who would take her clothes off. I would do the love scenes and I would do them myself,” says Bassett.

“I thought we could accomplish a sensuality without a gratuitous sexuality. We could achieve a heat on the screen and in the heads of the audience, as opposed to showing them.”

Up until now, as drama queen, she hasn’t held anything back. She’s rough and smokin’.

The answer, for all of you who are wondering, is eight hours a week. That’s how Angela Bassett has achieved those muscles and curves. Also, sorry to tell, she seems to have a gargantuan dose of near-perfect genes. And when she is preparing for a role, the workouts get a little more intense. Especially if the role requires her to spend most of her time making love to a younger man and strolling the Jamaican sands in a revealing wardrobe.

What she most wanted to show in her new movie, “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” was not her toned body but a softer, thoughtful, even silly version of herself. Not the Angela Bassett of “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” and “Waiting to Exhale” — of ultimatums, hysteria and heartbreak.

“It gave me an opportunity to play a few more delicate notes. I usually do difficult roles. It gave me a chance to do some lighter moments,” says Bassett of the romantic tale about a modern woman with well-worn degrees in both business and love.

This is not to say Bassett, whose rages resonate with every woman who couldn’t find the words to tell someone to get lost, is about to leap into comedy. “I am so much the drama queen,” she says. “So I don’t think that I am funny on screen. It is such a difficult thing to be genuinely funny on screen, which is why I appreciated so much the scenes with Whoopi. But I didn’t spend too much time sitting around thinking, How can I make this funny?’ My thought is always How can I make this honest?’ ”

For the uninitiated, the film — which opened Friday and is an adaptation of Terry McMillan’s mega-novel — follows Stella, 40, a successful stockbroker and single mother who needs to have a little fun. Whoopi Goldberg plays a friend, Delilah, who convinces her that the beach in Jamaica is an antidote to her stress. Almost immediately Stella falls into the arms of the charming and handsome Winston (the beguiling Taye Diggs), who has just passed 20. Once she is snared, Stella has to justify her infatuation and her decisions to her family, and almost everyone else.

In McMillan’s book, the romance and the reaction are played out on two levels: what Stella actually says aloud and the conversation she has with her conscience. One of the tricks of the movie is having Goldberg’s character magnified from a passing reference into a strong presence who articulates many of the outrageous, internal thoughts.

“Well, in the book she is dead,” says Bassett, in a deadpan that shows the lingering influence of Goldberg. “Delilah’s character and the relationship between Stella and Delilah provides a great deal of the humor. She added the life.”

Bassett, inhabiting just the corner of a formal chair in a Four Seasons dining room, is incessantly tapping her two-tone shoe against the chair facing her. It provides a beat, an improvised noise that stretches out the soft notes of her controlled, hushed voice.

She has impossibly ironed-out cheeks, and long brown arms that are chiseled like the indentations in a Waterford vase. Her petite curviness even comes through her loose, mannish beige suit. And in another bit of unfairness, Bassett will be 40 this month.

In this movie — even more than in her dominance as Tina Turner in “What’s Love,” and as the jilted Bernadine in “Exhale” — the camera consummates its love affair with Bassett. It lingers on the seduction in her smile, her cautionary gestures, her athletic yet coy walk, the intimate planes of her eyelids as she kisses. It has found the delicacy beneath the muscles, just as the camera once caught the steel and softness of Ingrid Bergman, Dorothy Dandridge, Ava Gardner and Lena Horne.

“Well, I like that. I can’t take issue with that,” she says of the comparison. She moves her casual, shoulder-length auburn hair slightly and presses together her lips. “I remember that Warren Beatty told me I needed to be photographed beautifully in the old Hollywood movie style,” she says. As she describes his take on her, she looks slightly embarrassed, as if she wants to recall the words that could be interpreted as vain or Hollywood-elitist. She decides to use the thought as a way to get back to Stella. “Perhaps in that you see what Winston sees in her, perhaps you see the beauty of a mature woman, the confidence and maturity.”

Yet she only displayed so much in this story about a hot romance with lovemaking under mosquito nets. “I told them I would not take my clothes off — I would not take all my clothes off nor would I have a body double who would take her clothes off. I would do the love scenes and I would do them myself,” says Bassett.

“I thought we could accomplish a sensuality without a gratuitous sexuality. We could achieve a heat on the screen and in the heads of the audience, as opposed to showing them.”

Up until now, as drama queen, she hasn’t held anything back. She’s rough and smokin’.