Alba Quirky

It’s not just more fun, it’s actually easier being blonde,” sighs Jessica Alba as she tosses back her recently peroxided locks. “It’s crazy, but as a kid I used to be the only brunette in the audition queues. All the other girls looked exactly alike with the big teeth and blue eyes and blonde hair. But I just got tired of always being cast as the dark exotic type. It’s gets boring after a while.”

Well, tough Ms. Alba. Even with the bleach job, the twenty-four year old is a decidedly dusky beauty. With ebony eyes, lashes that curl toward the heavens, and mocha skin, she’s not really in any position to complain about genetics. Of Danish, French and Mexican descent, she makes for one unnaturally fit specimen. Very unnatural in fact. Today, every time I look across at her bee-stung lips and teeny-tiny waist, I keep imagining that I’m talking to a life-size Bratz doll.
Naturally, these exaggerated physical charms have proved rather advantageous in Hollywood. In 2000, having already spent her cute formative years in front of the camera for TV shows such as Flipper, she was hand picked from hundreds of Nietzschean Californians by Titanic director James Cameron for the role of the Max – an experiment in genetic perfection appropriately enough – in the TV series Dark Angel. Despite the programme's subsequent cancellation, she still speaks fondly of the alter-ego which catapulted her into the grubby fantasies of internet nerds everywhere.
“I really got Max," she says. "She was really contained and didn’t like letting others know what her deal was. But I also remember James Cameron describing her ethnicity as the future of the race. I liked that. As I grew up I was always getting typecast as the Latin girl. That usually meant I was the janitor’s daughter who got involved with a white boy. I’ve never thought of myself like that. My dad is Mexican and my mom is French Canadian and I’m the colour I am, but I’ve never felt Latin or anything other than a proper melting pot American. Because guess what? This is what an American is supposed to look like.”
Well, she certainly embodies the national work ethic just as nicely as the notion of a multi-racial love-in. A self-confessed workaholic, when I ask this rather sensible, self-contained young woman about interests beyond her career, she’s genuinely hard pressed to come up with anything. “You know, I don’t really have a lot of time to do things. I go to the gym a lot but that’s really a work thing. You have to look good to get hired. I’ve done kung fu and motor-biking and dancing and lots of things down the years, but they’ve all been related to my job and my characters. Beyond that, I like walking my dogs and listening to Coldplay and Citizen Cope. My favourite thing to do is downloading recipes from the internet and trying them out on my family. Not very exciting for anyone but me.”
Is her rather sedate recreational life a reflection of growing up in the spotlight, I wonder. After all, a fleeting tour of cyberspace will allow one a glimpse of Jessica eating dinner at a restaurant last month. Or going shopping. Or indeed, walking her beloved pooches. “Definitely that’s a factor,” she nods in her characteristically serious way. “I’m not an overnight success story. I’ve worked for 11 years straight to get to where I am now. I don’t want to blow it, especially not now things are really happening.”
Things certainly are happening for Ms. Alba in 2005. Over the coming months she’ll be starring in three humongous action driven blockbusters; Sin City, Fantastic Four and Into The Blue.
“They’re all coming out around the same time, but it’s one of those actor things where you don’t plan it that way," she explains. "I did Into The Blue a while ago. It’s an underwater action girl part and I got to scuba-dive in the Bahamas for a couple of months so straight away I said yes. I’ve been a qualified scuba-diver since I did Flipper aged 12 so it was great being able to use that again. There’s a lot more pressure on for Fantastic Four, because it’s a big family movie. My character is a scientist who has trouble expressing her emotions and keeps turning invisible because of genetic alterations and her feelings for this guy. I‘m finally an action figure.”
Always with the genetic modifications and emotional reticence, eh Jessica?
“I know. I know. It’s not a million miles from Max. Or me.”
At least she gets to cut loose in Sin City. Adapted and directed from Frank Miller’s magnificently debauched comic books, the film, directed by Miller himself and Robert Rodriguez (with additional help from one Quentin Tarantino) makes dazzling use of CGI to create a stylised sleazy action thriller from an urban cesspool of vice and perversion.
“I loved having a few directors around on set,” grins Jessica. “You could talk the ear off one director about your character and what you should be doing, then move right on to the next guy.”
Featuring such memorable deviants as Mickey Rourke’s behemoth killing machine, Elijah Wood’s mute serial killing cannibal, Benicio Del Toro’s girl-beating menace, dominatrix-prostitutes who’ve overthrown their male pimps and lots of other nice people, Sin City’s brilliant post-cinematic milieu faithfully recreates three of Miller’s graphic-graphic novels; The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard. The resulting testosterone-fuelled psychosis makes one think of Hemingway on Viagra, particularly when Bruce Willis’ Last Good Cop In Town saves little girl Nancy from a sadistic murderous paedophile (Nick Stahl), only for her to become a romanticised stripper in adulthood.
Jessica admits to being somewhat apprehensive about her duties on the pole as the older Nancy, but it could have been a whole lot worse. Having nursed a long-standing desire to work with director Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, Spy Kids), she even agreed to audition like a regular mortal knowing nothing about the project. “I was so pathetic for a week while I was waiting for word. I just sat around thinking ‘I hope he likes me. I hope he likes me’.”
He did. She remained, however, blissfully ignorant about what lay in store. Then she saw her character on the pulpy page for the first time.
“I didn’t realise until I saw the graphic novel. I was like ‘Whoa! Wait a second, she’s topless, um, worse, she’s bottomless too! Does she have to be?’ I was really glad when Robert left it up to me because I figured I could do sexy in chaps and a lasso. Even though I really wanted to work with Robert for the longest time, my dad would have died if I had been naked in a movie. I couldn’t have done it. But I’m sure some other girl would have! This way I could shock my family because they're very suburban and quiet, but without actually killing any of them.”
Still, between wearing a heavy, leather jewel-encrusted bra, strutting without the aid of a choreographer, learning to use a lasso and being worked on the pole by her directors doing re-takes until five in the morning, Sin City wasn’t an easy ride.
“Robert just told me to go for something primal like Selma Hayek did for him in From Dusk ‘Til Dawn. I just remember thinking, ‘Oh that’ll be easy. It’s only like the sexiest scene in the world’. I had an idea about rhythm from doing Honey because that had a lot of dancing in it. Dancing with the lasso was trickier. It’s like learning to walk and talk and chew gum at the same time. I kept hitting myself in the head with it. I thought I was going to look like such a spazz. But Robert got some cowboys to show me what to do. Thankfully, because my dad was in the Air Force, we lived in California and Mississippi and Texas. So I know how to handle cowboys.”
I can only imagine. At least her onscreen romance with Bruce Willis proved less tricky than mastering the rope.
“I love older guys,” she gushes. “Well, a certain kind of older guy like Bruce or Harrison Ford or Steve McQueen or Robert Redford or Warren Beatty. They never seem like they’re manipulating the audience with their performances or acting all fucked up. I like that. I like guys that are rugged, not just in a movie star way. I like a man. I like someone who is really comfortable with being a grown up. So that was really cool for me.”
She was equally thrilled with the fabulous Brunel-worthy on-screen bra constructed to preserve her modesty and push all the right things together and up, up, up.
“Oh wow, the bra was great. I have absolutely no cleavage so I brought in my favourite secret support swimming costume and had the bra made to those specifications. So the costume designer did a great job, plus I had help because I stuffed two shoulder pads in. Best cleavage I‘ve ever had.”
The garment is certainly in keeping with Sin City’s bastardised modern sexual politics. Inspired by the more hardcore, hard-bitten efforts from the noir genre, in Frank Miller’s diseased world chivalry reigns, but the distressed damsels sure as hell don’t wear white. Or much of anything. It’s post-feminism, but only in the same sense as topless darts and hen parties. Of course, in the incredibly heightened context of the movie, it works, but didn’t it all feel a bit Boy’s Own during production?
“Oh yeah, definitely. But I’ve just gotten used to that. I was the only girl on Dark Angel and again in Fantastic Four. I mean, I love women. I’m very supportive of women and I think it’s important that we support each other. I love to play roles that women can embrace and look up to because that’s what I like. I like to watch cool chicks. But I can hang with the boys. I’m not so girlie that I need to be a sexual person. When I’m around boys I can just sit there, drink beer and watch the game. I have a brother so I‘m used to male company.”
Interestingly, the roles Jessica has come to be associated with – particularly Max in Dark Angel – straddle a similar dichotomy. While she tends to play tumbling tomboys, they always seem quite adept at wilting into vulnerability and pornographic simpering when the need arises. “Yeah. That’s totally it. That’s what I like. I think that‘s part of who I am and it shows up. Like with Fantastic Four, Sue Storm is really feminine and very reserved, but there‘s a toughness about her and I suspect I brought that. It‘s just me doing both parts of me.”
As a girl who likes her football, she has understandably ambiguous feelings about the lad mags that continue to eagerly plaster her on covers and drool in prose over her uncommon attributes. “A lot of the time people don’t realise that when you’re doing a photo shoot for those kinds of publications, you’re only doing it out of obligation to the studio. It’s part of your publicity tour of duty. You do it for a movie and never for yourself.”
Does it make her uncomfortable?
“Yeah. Not so much now, but each time it‘s different. When I was 18 I had to do a photo shoot for Maxim in a bathing suit and I was freaked out. It‘s really about how tasteful it is. I did a shoot last year for GQ and I had absolutely no clothes on but I was very tastefully covered by a sheet. That one didn‘t bother me at all. It had more class. At the end of the day I regard it as work.”
Although she’s just turned 24 – normally the age when women in Hollywood start getting cast as Dakota Fanning’s mother – Jessica is not about to relinquish her new burgeoning super-star status without a fight. “I know that’s a reality but a lot of women do have unrealistic expectations about Hollywood. They still want to play schoolgirls when they’re 30 and that’s just creepy.”
Well, as a veteran of the final series of Beverly Hills 90210, Jessica should know. “That was something," she recalls. “You weren’t allowed to look at the stars directly in the face on set. Or speak to them. Or say their names. It was ridiculous. You had to do scenes with people while averting your eyes. I guess they just didn’t want us looking at their wrinkles.”
Ms. Alba is not only justifiably sniffy about such vanity, she’s not remotely inclined to keep checking the mirror for crow’s feet. “I don’t worry about that. I worry about my work. There are lots of women currently in Hollywood who are doing things in their 30s. Julia Roberts and Angelina Jolie are that age and they still get to do sexy roles. It’s the same rule as you get with male actors. Being comfortable with adulthood and with who you are is sexy.”
Now that she’s wrapped three of the year’s biggest movies, Jessica is looking forward to getting back to her kitchen.
“I can’t wait to cook some recipes. I’ve been working really hard so this is a good time for me to sit back and enjoy it by doing some food preparation! I just love figuring out dishes and putting the time in and making people happy.”
That doesn’t sound all that dissimilar to the way she feels about acting. “Yeah, absolutely. I don’t act for myself. If I did I’d just stay home looking in a mirror. I love to entertain people and I love that they can enjoy a story that I’m part of.”
Or watching her strip with a lasso.
“That too.”

Read a review of Sin City here