Barely there
By: Cindy PearlmanJessica Alba deals with defeating Dr Doom and being invisible in the summer blockbuster `Fantastic Four'
It took James Cameron to set Jessica Alba straight on her place as a young Latina in Hollywood.
``My mom is a very pale Caucasian woman and my Dad is dark and Mexican,'' the 24-year-old Alba says. ``I'm in the middle. I remember, when I first started in this business, it was very difficult, because the only calls I used to get were to play Maria, the janitor's daughter who messes around with the white kid.
``It always seemed very classist to me.''
Then Cameron, creator of Titanic (1997) and the first two Terminator movies, cast her as the lead in his television series Dark Angel (2000-2002) and sat her down for a chat.
``Jim said to me, `Jessica, you're the future of this race. You're also a human being. Don't ever forget it,''' she recalls.
From there Alba's career took off. Dark Angel led to Honey (2003) and a role as a sweet stripper in the offbeat Frank Miller/Robert Rodriguez film Sin City (2005), a character she may reprise in a sequel. In the autumn she'll play a bikini-clad treasure hunter in Into the Blue.
Before that, though, she has a lead role in Fantastic Four, the Marvel Comics adaptation that's opening nationwide in the US tomorrow.
As in the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby original, Fantastic Four depicts an experimental space voyage that goes wrong, with cosmic rays having unpredictable effects on the four passengers. Alba plays mild-mannered Sue Storm, who becomes the Invisible Girl _ able not only to turn invisible but also to form and manipulate invisible force fields.
Also along on the trip is Sue's unrequited love, Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd), who gains super-stretching powers as Mr Fantastic, and his best friend, Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis), who turns into a gigantic, rock-studded monster called the Thing. Sue's kid brother, Johnny Storm (Chris Evans), becomes the Human Torch, a being of living flame.
After discovering their new selves, the four band together to keep peace on earth _ which includes defeating the evil Dr Doom (Julian McMahon) _ and deal with the pressure of being world-famous superheroes.
``It's nice to do a family movie,'' Alba says over tea at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills, California, ``but the pressure is on too. It's a big summer movie, and I'm really feeling the heat of wanting it to do well.''
A slip of a young woman in a yellow sun dress, with a mass of long, blonde curls hiding her face, Alba says that she found Sue Storm a particularly challenging character to play because, after all, she's invisible for many of her key scenes.
``I play a scientist in Fantastic Four who has a problem expressing her emotions,'' the actress says. ``When her DNA is altered, her emotions take a strange twist: When she gets emotional, she goes invisible. The minute she screams, she's invisible. She's upset, and goes invisible.
``Let's just say that she's a completely frustrated girl, so she goes invisible a lot.''
It doesn't help that Reed is totally clueless about Sue's love for him.
``The man she's in love with completely ignores her,'' Alba says with a laugh, ``which also makes her go invisible, poor girl.
``It's actually a tough character to play,'' the actress says more seriously, ``because I'm not physically there for a lot of it. I acted the role knowing that I would be digitally removed.''
Alba will be much more visible in the Scuba film Into the Blue, opening this autumn and co-starring Paul Walker. The movie revolves around a group of Scuba divers who swim into the wrong place at the wrong time and find themselves in trouble with a ring of drug smugglers.
``James Cameron was talking to me about doing a comic type of movie that involved Scuba diving,'' Alba says. ``That movie never happened, but then Into the Blue came along. I love to Scuba dive and, when I got the offer, I hadn't been diving in seven months. I heard someone was going to actually give me a decent paycheck to Scuba dive in the Bahamas for five months. I was like, `Cool, sign me up!'
``Honestly, that's why I did the movie.''
Fantastic Four and Into the Blue are both likely to be vastly less dark than Sin City, the stylish comic-book adaptation in which Alba played a good-hearted stripper stalked by a psychotic rapist.
``I went to strip clubs to see how strippers do it,'' the actress recalls. ``But then Robert Rodriguez said, `Forget the choreographer. Let's turn on some music. Just feel it.' He wanted me to be primal.
``He said, `Strip like Salma Hayek stripped in From Dusk til Dawn','' she adds. ``Well, that was just about the sexiest dance ever on screen. I had to live up to something, because there hasn't ever been a dance to rival Salma.''
It didn't help that Alba's stripper _ and no, she never actually took it all off _ uses a gimmick: She's an expert rope-twirler, meaning that the actress had to take lasso lessons as well.
``My heart was beating so fast when I held the lasso,'' she says, laughing. ``During the training I whacked myself in the head so many times!''
An army brat who grew up all over the US, Alba has wanted to act for as long as she can remember. It was not until she was 12, however, that her parents let her take acting classes.
``When I told my mother that I wanted to act, she said, `It's such a tough business. So hard, so cutthroat,''' Alba recalls. ``My father just said, `It's not a real job. They'll just want to get you naked.'''
After settling in southern California, however, her parents allowed Alba to start lessons, and nine months later she had an agent. She made her film debut in Camp Nowhere (1994), a two-week role as an extra that got bumped up when one of the leads quit and Alba won her part.
The same year she co-starred on Nickelodeon's popular series The Secret World of Alex Mack, in which she was a snobby girl making life hell for the title character. She went on to the movies Never Been Kissed (1999) and Idle Hands (1999), before Cameron cast her as Max on Dark Angel.
The series aired for only two seasons, but it was enough to turn Alba into a sex symbol and render her recognisable all across the US _ to her considerable surprise.
``The first time I was recognised, it was really weird,'' Alba recalls. ``I felt like an impostor or an alien. I was in an airport, and someone yelled, `Hey, Jessica Alba!'
``I couldn't stop thinking, `Did I go to high school with this person? How does she know my name?'''