`SOUL FOOD' ROLE A MEAL IN ITSELF.

Vivica A. Fox is an actress who knows what side her bread is buttered on, assuming she ever ate her bread with butter. Prep work for her roles in ``Independence Day,'' ``Booty Call'' and ``Batman & Robin'' required more than memorizing lines. There was also knowing the caloric value of every morsel to pass between her much-heralded lips. Life's hard when you're a Nubian lust object.

No wonder ``Soul Food'' felt like a blessing.

``I could actually EAT,'' said Fox, 33, who plays Maxine, the pregnant middle sister in a family with a pretty astounding gene pool. (The other sisters are played by Vanessa L. Williams and Nia Long.) ``I didn't have to be with the trainer five days a week or be satisfied with eating a piece of carrot.''

The throwing-down didn't stop off-screen either. The focus of the clan - the sisters and their husbands - is the sumptuous supper they share each Sunday at the home of the family matriarch, meals re-created in full ham-hock splendor on camera. ``I could actually grub on the catfish and greens,'' Fox said, laughing. ``I had a LOT of fun making this movie. It was in Chicago, near my family, and it was cold. I needed that food.''

Fox (whose first name is pronounced the regular, emphasis-on-the-first-syllable way) is no fool. She looks good and she knows it. Even if she didn't, her inclusion in People mag's ``50 Most Beautiful'' issue last year might have been a tip-off.

She's not going to inspire many pity parties, but beauty, she reminds, can be a trap. ``I don't want people to just perceive me as body and beauty. I'm a lot deeper than just the physical. Yes, the Lord has blessed me, and I'm thankful. But I'm trying to strive for inner beauty more than anything, and I think that may be what is attracting people to me right now.''

The actress, who sports a fox tattoo on her upper left arm, carefully chooses her roles to show off different facets of her personality.

``Independence Day,'' in which she played Will Smith's single-mom girlfriend, ``was like action-hero babe, and ``Set It Off'' had me as kind of a psycho babe.'' (She was a bank-teller-run-amok in that one.) ``Booty Call,'' the safe-sex comedy, ``was a chance for me to lighten things up a bit. Now it is time for people to see me as a more strong, maternal type.''

``Soul Food,'' co-produced by Tracey E. Edmonds and executive-produced by her husband, pop-music wizard Kenneth ``Babyface'' Edmonds, in his first moviemaking foray, is a gentle but hardly Pollyannaish story of an African-American family living in Chicago. The tale, written and directed by George Tillman Jr., is told from the perspective of Maxine's 12-year-old son and unfolds around the three sisters.

The family is a lot like her own people - strong, middle-class folks from the Midwest, says Fox. The actress - the only daughter in a house of three kids - was born in Indianapolis, the daughter of a prep school dean and a pharmaceutical technician who both had roots in Mississippi.

``There's such a similarity to my life. Big Mama in the movie is like my mother. My mother is the glue of our family: She holds us together, through sibling rivalries, trials and tribulations. ... The movie shows how this family drifted apart and then came back together, and I think that's so true in real life.''

Though she believes ``Soul Food'' tells a story anyone can relate to, Fox says she's relieved to be in a black-oriented movie relatively free of the stock characters and plotlines Hollywood throws at African-Americans. ``Isn't that a welcome change for a black film?,'' she said. ``We're not often seen this way.''

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Photo

Photo: Jeffrey D. Sams, left, Vivica A. Fox and Brandon Hammond are a tight-knit family in ``Soul Food.''