Meet Precious' Gabby Sidibe

Gabourey "Gabby" Sidibe is having a Precious moment.

The 26-year-old New Yorker is making her big-screen debut — opposite stars including Mo'Nique, Lenny Kravitz, and Mariah Carey — playing Clareece "Precious" Jones in Precious, which is based on the popular novel Push by Sapphire.

Here are 8 things to know about the newcomer:

1. Her last name is pronounced SIH-deh-bay.

2. She's confident. "They try to paint the picture that I was this downtrodden, ugly girl who was unpopular in school and in life, and then I got this role and now I'm awesome," the actress told New York mag. “But the truth is that I’ve been awesome, and then I got this role."

3. The Brooklyn-born and Harlem-raised star spent her teen years hanging around outside MTV's TRL studios in Times Square with her BFF, Crystal, to get a glimpse of 'N Sync.

4. She cut a college class to audition for Precious — and got a call back within an hour.

5. She already has her next role locked and loaded — and she'll have a love scene. She'll appear in Yelling to the Sky with Don Cheadle. "I get to play a bad girl who beats other girls up," she has said. "And I get to make out with a boy — I wrote that into the script."

6. She juggles a lot of men. Asked if she has four or five boyfriends, she said: “Yes, but I don’t want to get serious enough to call them boyfriends. This one guy, I’ve deleted his number. I would text him at 7pm, and he’d be like, ‘I’m at BBQ's [restaurant].’ But the thing is, you don’t go to BBQ's with your boys, you go with a girl. Then he’d call me at 11. I’m like: ‘Why don’t you call me at 6 when you’re ready to go to BBQ’s?’ Don’t, don’t, don’t! I’m not a regular girl. I just got off a plane from France. You need to check yourself.”

7. She's just not into Taylor Swift. During a photo shoot over the summer, one of the country star's songs came on the sound system and Gabby groaned: "Is this Taylor Swift?"

8. She's probably not reading this. "I try to stay off the Internet," she told Interview. "Just because people hurt my feelings sometimes. My audition tape somehow ended up on YouTube, and, like, 40,000 people have seen it, and a lot of people have commented that I’m an incredible actress. But other opinions weren’t so nice, physically or whatever."

Check out the trailer for Precious — in limited release starting Nov. 6 — here.