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07-15-2005, 11:38 AM
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| Swedish chef   |  [img]smile.gif[/img] 'Everyone Assumes I Should Be Naked'; Jessica Alba, Hollywood's Hottest New Sex Symbol, Talks to Rebecca Hardy About Her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Why She Refuses to Strip for the Cameras and Her Latest Role As a Comic-Book Superhero in the Summer Blockbuster Fantastic Four Jul 03, 2005: Mail on Sunday; London (UK) Jessica Alba was an obsessive compulsive child. She'd switch off a light if it was left on for second, unplug everything in the house, organise and worry. Her childhood was ruined by an unstoppable stream of 'what ifs'. 'I was a worrier,' she says. 'I'd worry that there was going to be a fire. I'd worry about my problems and everyone else's problems.' She also suffered from chronic asthma, was neurotic and an insomniac. Obsessive compulsive disorder is common to those who feel unable to control life about them. Alba's childhood was chaotic: parents who married too young and, unforgivably at that time, outside their ethnic group (her father, Mark, is Mexican, her mother, Cathy, is Danish); a childhood spent in numerous homes as her father's job in the US Air Force took them across America; and lengthy stays in hospital recovering from asthma. And all this she dealt with privately, within her immediate family unit of warring parents and younger brother Joshua, for her mother's family cut out their daughter when she married a man with brown skin. Friends stopped being friends and soon the marriage turned rotten in the fetid climate of racial prejudice. 'They were young. They loved hard and they fought hard,' says Alba, 24. 'And, yes, it was frightening.' Alba learned to loathe racial prejudice, to abhor discrimination. She hated to be put in a box. She part Mexican, part Danish but, she says, American through and through. Racial stereotyping makes her furious, and when the studios tried to cast her on the basis of her skin colour, she was having none of it. Today, she is one of the highest-paid actors of her generation, not typecast but sought after, and commands more than $1 million a film. Her role as Susan Storm/Invisible Woman in the $110 million (Pounds 60 million) blockbuster Fantastic Four is set to bring her even greater success. 'When I started acting, people tried to typecast me as an ethnic girl,' she says. 'It was my first experience of racism. But people will always put you down to a certain level, a certain class. They'll always try to put you in a box and I never wanted to be pigeonholed. 'The people who are going to be running the world in the next generation aren't racist or sexist. There's a group of people in their twenties, with different coloured skins, who are going to be in charge of the studios of tomorrow, the agencies, the film business. I'm going to be with them, and that's exciting.' Indeed, Alba is a major player within a hip, young multiracial elite that is fast dominating Hollywood. You can see it on Sunset Strip, in the fashionable restaurants and bars. The pneumatic blonde of the nineties is a dying breed. Today, diversity is the fashion statement. Hispanic is cool. African American is hip. Big bottoms or booties as they're known here are in. Stick thin and silicone is, well, a bit passe. Alba's boyfriend, Harvard-educated Cash Warren, assistant director on Fantastic Four, is part of the happening set, too. He also knows discrimination. His father is Hill Street Blues actor Michael Warren. 'His father is black, his mum is white,' says Alba. 'My mum's family separated themselves from her when she married my dad and Warren's family went through a similar thing. It exists. It's just small-mindedness.' Alba is smart, sassy, edgy and extraordinarily beautiful. She knows she's got 'the goods', as she puts it, but again refuses to be defined by the fusion of her Mexican/Danish genes. When asked to appear nude in Sin City, she told the filmmakers to go sling their lasso. 'I'd like to see a man do a sexy dance naked in front of a group of strangers,' she says. 'It was sexy enough with what I wore [a leather bra and chaps]. 'I have an amazing lawyer. He protects me. If people viewed me differently it wouldn't be a big deal, but because everyone assumes I should be naked some people even assume I've done naked scenes when I haven't it makes me feel that I don't need to do that to get my point across. I'm just not comfortable with it.' Alba is wearing a pair of loose-fitting jeans and a white, lace-trimmed T-shirt. A black bra peeps from the low- cut V-neckline of her top, screaming of a smouldering sexuality. Yes, for those that wonder, Alba is as stunning in the flesh as she is on screen. She's also articulate and bright, with a cool confidence common to the new generation. 'I'm not worried about being able to hold my own on screen,' she says. 'It's just whether you have the opportunities the right agent at the right time for the right roles.' Much of Alba's public profile to date has been defined by her sex appeal. The alleged list of exboyfriends is so long that I wonder where she's fitted in the time to make films. 'Gossip columns don't mean a thing to me,' she says, dismissing reports of a romance with Friends star David Schwimmer. 'I didn't have my first real relationship until I was 18 and that lasted until I was 22. That was with Michael Weatherly who worked on [TV sci-fi thriller] Dark Angel with me. We were engaged for two years, and it hurt when the relationship ended everybody hurts when you've been with someone for that long. But, if someone doesn't want to be in a relationship, or changes, there's no point carrying on.' Alba says she didn't 'jump into another relationship' until she met Cash ten months ago. 'I hung out with different guys and got a feeling for what it was like to stand on my own two feet as a woman,' she says. 'I never put too much emphasis on sex. I didn't think I needed to marry a guy just because I wanted to sleep with him. 'What I needed to work out was what I wanted in a relationship, what made me happy and not just try to please other people. I suppose I'd just worked that out when Cash came along. We could have run into each other at so many different times we know the same people, he works in the same area as me but we met at the right time.' Alba is normally very controlled. Emotions scare her. 'I'm very cerebral, very intense,' she says. 'I check myself when I do anything emotionally. For me, acting is cathartic when I'm playing a character, I can go to an extreme where I can let go. 'As a child I'd have anxiety attacks, and obsessive compulsive disorder was a way of trying to control the world around me. Maybe I felt the need to be in control because we moved around a lot, or perhaps I was ill. Maybe it was having parents who were so young and so emotional.' Alba's mother was 19 years old and six months pregnant when she got married. 'I always knew my parents loved my brother and me unconditionally, and that we were always the priority, but they had their problems,' she says. 'They are still together, which is pretty amazing.' Alba was a mess as a child sickly, neurotic and a loner. 'I had everything from cysts on my tonsils to kidney problems,' she says. 'I was in hospital so much as a child that I'd be away for three weeks at a time, come back and everyone would act like I was a stranger. It was horrible. I didn't really feel attached to anyone. 'I was an insomniac until I was 18. If I was lucky I would sleep a couple of hours a night. When I was a child it was a lot worse. Part of it was a side effect of the asthma medication, which worked rather like an amphetamine, speeding up the blood supply to my lungs. I had such severe asthma that I had to take a really high dose. When it got even worse I was put on steroids. I gained almost 20lb being seven years old and gaining 20lb was so unfair.' As a child, Alba was the proverbial ugly duckling pigeon-toed with a big bottom and big lips. She didn't have front teeth until she was eight, because her brother had knocked out her baby set. When her adult teeth eventually grew through, she was bucktoothed and spoke with a lisp. She says she developed a feisty attitude and became one of the boys as a shield against her unhappiness. 'I hated the thought that men were leaders,' she says. 'I wanted to be better than the boys, and was very competitive and very sporty. I'd watch films such as Die Hard and want a woman to be the lead. I began to believe the world was my oyster, that I could do anything and have whatever I wanted as I didn't have anything to start with I had nothing to limit me. 'I wasn't given a trust fund. I didn't have a family that was going to hand me down some money. When you start from the bottom you can go nowhere but up.' Alba started acting at the age of 12. A year earlier she'd won a talent contest, and the prize was acting classes. 'We didn't have much money,' she says. 'My mum worked two or three jobs and my dad always held down three jobs. I could only really be an actor I won the grand prize. There were 2,000 other children competing for these classes. The prize was my chance to go somewhere else.' Alba landed her first job within ten months completing her classes. She'd been hired for three days for the film Camp Nowhere, and the director extended her contract when another actress dropped out. After graduating from high school, she decided pursue acting fulltime, joining the Atlantic Theater Company at the age of 16. Her big break came in 1999 when she appeared in two films Never Been Kissed, with Drew Barrymore, and Idle Hands. Soon after, she secured a role in the critically acclaimed Dark Angel made by Titanic director James Cameron. In 2003, she starred in the hip-hop dance film Honey. Then came this year's star-studded Sin City. Recently she's filmed Into the Blue with Paul Walker and Scott Caan, and, of course, Fantastic Four. The film, based upon the longest-running series Marvel Comics, has taken 44 years to reach the screen, largely because the Four's powers are extreme that it took Hollywood special effects that long to catch up with the superheroes. 'The character I play runs the space programme that a billionaire is funding,' says Alba. 'She's the only woman in a man's world. She's very conservative, very refined, a little uptight, a control freak in fact, a of the things that I am. It was fun to play that part myself, to grow out of the tomboy aspect of my personality and really dive into the feminine side, to learn to be assertive without being very masculine. 'I was probably hired because of all the reasons director would want me in a comic-book film feisty, busty, and with long legs. But the role is such a reversal of that. She's a scientist yet maternal definitely more in keeping with who I am now. I'm not the gumsmacking cursing tomboy that I used to be. 'I suppose it takes the comic book character out the box and that's something that appeals to me.' Indeed, Alba is now attached to her next two as unnamed projects as assistant producer. She says: I'm going to play an action girl again, I have to be able to produce her. People don't just brush me off anymore which puts me in a nicer position.' I suspect it would take a very brave or foolish man to give this determined young woman the brush off. Alba puts on the sunglasses she removed when sat down and strolls towards the door, tall with confidence of a new generation that's happy to leave the lights on. 'Fantastic Four' opens in the UK on July 22. Question time Five people you'd invite to dinner? 'Michael Caine, his wife Shakira, Katharine Hepburn, Peter Sellers, Alfred Hitchcock.' Last shopping trip and what you bought? 'Two days ago, I bought a new fruit bowl made out of papier-mache.' Beauty secret? 'A lot of water two litres a day.' G-strings or pants? 'G-strings.' Song that means the most to you? 'Anything by Bob Dylan.' First poster on your wall? 'John Lennon's Imagine.' Most guilty about eating? 'Onion rings and chocolate if I eat them in the same meal.' Last time you got drunk? 'I'm too old to get drunk.' Superhero power? 'I like to go invisible, like my character in Fantastic Four.' Most important thing you have lost? 'A cross from my parents.' When did you last use public transport? 'Do aeroplanes count?' Source: http://www.grab.com/movies/news/8058 |
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07-15-2005, 10:10 PM
| #9 (permalink) | |
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07-16-2005, 05:30 AM
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07-17-2005, 03:59 PM
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| Onion rings and chocolate at the same sitting? Where's this girl eating at? Warren "Harvard-educated." Does that mean he actually graduated or stayed a semester and bombed out? Harvard-degreed would mean the former, I think, but I guess you gotta give the guy small props just for attending but he could have gotten that on connections alone. I knew he was multi-cultural but didn't know about the Hill Street Blues connection. One thing that bothers me: I know this is an English interview but can't they spell things the way she says them. I know she's not saying "mum." |
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07-20-2005, 03:08 AM
| #13 (permalink) |
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|  Great article. That question time area would make a great set of wallpapers or something. Each one can suit the answer she gave to the question. I knew there was a reason I loved h er in Fantastic Four: Superhero power? 'I like to go invisible, like my character in Fantastic Four.' I would love to do the same exact thing! |
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07-22-2005, 12:55 PM
| #15 (permalink) |
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| No, you should NOT be naked Jessica. There's nothing so extraordinary about your body that people need to see it. Guys desire you. Since they can't have you, they seek any other possible way to get more intimate with you and feel that nude pics will fulfill that desire. Sexual desire is really a product of emotional desire, in other words, the root of the desire is emotional. It is the desire to be loved by you. Fulfilling sexual fantasy is fruitless. It's like sucking a baby pacifier. The pacifier feels like the right thing, but the baby will starve to death since NO nutritional benefit actually comes from it. To make a long story short, you must, Please, clone yourself, many thousands of times, so that all of us guys can be loved by our very own Jessica Alba. |
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07-22-2005, 04:41 PM
| #16 (permalink) | |
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