Per the LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Well it took  four years playing of playing an exuberant young office worker on TV comedy “Ugly Betty,”  but actress America Ferrera is all grown up and taking a more serious turn in a movie.

The actress, who won an Emmy and a Golden Globe award for her portrayal of Ugly Betty is starring in independent film drama “The Dry Land,” which opens in major U.S. cities on Friday and was written and directed by her fiancee Ryan Piers Williams.

“I feel like it’s a new chapter in my career,” Ferrera told Reuters. “This is my first role as a woman dealing with really grown up issues.”

The movie has earned mostly positive early reviews and scored a 63 percent positive rating among a group of eight critics polled by movie website rottentomatoes.com.

Ferrera portrays the wife of a soldier (Ryan O’Nan) who has returned to his Texas home from the war in Iraq and is suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.

The soldier, named James, has very little memory of his injury, and when he returns home, dormant anxieties begin to surface that affect his relationships with his wife, mother (Melissa Leo) and best friend (Jason Ritter).

Looking to understand what happened to him, James embarks on a road trip with an army buddy (Wilmer Valderrama) to piece together the details of his tour of duty and try to put some order back into his life.

The film was shot last summer over the course of four weeks while Ferrera was on hiatus from “Betty.”

“I had three days to (mentally switch) from Betty to Sara,” recalled America Ferrera. “I wrapped ‘Betty’ on a Saturday at 6 o’clock in the morning and was shooting in New Mexico by Tuesday.

The film screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the same month the ABC television network announced it was canceling “Betty.” The series went off the air in April, and Ferrera immediately immersed herself in promoting “Dry Land” with Williams.

Enjoy the trailer of America Ferrara in Dry Land and then tell me what you think!