Jessica: The Visible Woman

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The visible woman
June 10, 2007

LIKE all good superheroes, Jessica Alba leads a double life. There's Jessica Alba the actor: star of TV series Dark Angel and the smash-hit movies Sin City, Fantastic Four and its coming sequel in which she reprises her role as Sue Storm, aka the Invisible Woman.

Then there's Jessica Alba the sex goddess, who features prominently in magazine polls judging her among the sexiest women alive, put on the cover of Playboy magazine against her wishes and whose bikini-clad body was strategically enhanced on the posters for the dopey sunken treasure yarn Into the Blue.

The Jessica Alba sitting on a couch high up in the Crown Towers recently, in town to spruik the then-unfinished Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer says she recognises and is proud of the former, but accepts that the latter is part and parcel of the movie-making and media machine and treats her objectification and reluctant celebrity with a business-like resignation.

"I completely dissociate myself from that person," the stunning, but demurely dressed Alba says. "It's work. It's not me as a person. Nobody is buying into me as a person. A $100 million movie filled with special effects is a hell of a lot more interesting than me going grocery shopping.

"I just know that I am a part of a bigger machine because it is nothing to do with me. I never wake up thinking I want to be on this list today. It kind of just happens. I am working in this business at a time where that is emphasised, so I am not really bucking it. It is what it is.

"I don't think I would do this for a living if I felt exploited by it. I would pursue theatre and wait tables and go do something completely different."

Alba's way of dealing with the cult of celebrity is to try to switch it off and focus on her acting and she is dead serious about it even if she is unlikely to be troubling the Academy any time soon. She took her first acting class at the age of 12, but spent much of her early career moving from job to job -- including a cheesy update of Flipper filmed in Australia and a brief role on teen sitcom Beverly Hills 90210 -- with little understanding of what she was doing and no confidence in front of the camera. A harsh self-critic, she looks back on her early work and cringes.

"I had no understanding of how to play a character or what that meant," she says candidly.

"I was just getting jobs and hoping to God I didn't suck that badly -- and frankly, most of it really sucked."

A stint at the Atlantic Theatre Company, where her teachers included respected actors William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman helped teach her some technique, but it took the financial success of the first Fantastic Four movie (which, despite a critical hammering and a Razzie Award nomination for Alba made a respectable $391 million worldwide) to give the her confidence to apply it.

"I was always trying to make the director happy and make the other actors and the producer happy," she says. "Acting wasn't a selfish thing and not until after the success of Fantastic Four did I think that I had been doing this for so long and it was time to do what made me happy. So I have learned to apply the method a little bit in different ways."

Alba's response to her newfound Hollywood clout is to throw herself into as many different products in as many different genres as she can. Apart from the Rise of the Silver Surfer, she has also completed a thriller with Hayden Christensen called Awake; her first romantic comedy, Good Luck Chuck; and a Hong Kong horror remake called The Eye. All of which is part of the grand plan.

"It has definitely been a concerted effort to do as much variety as possible," she says. "I really enjoy what I do for a living and it's not about being a celebrity for me."

With the Fantastic Four sequel still not finished and the finer details under wraps, Alba can only go on her gut feeling that it will match the surprise success of the original.

Alba gets a little tetchy at the observation that the first movie was dismissed as being lightweight and somewhat bland and a disappointment to fans of the comic.

"The people who thought our movie should have been a bit darker or edgier were not Fantastic Four fans at all," she says.

"They were critics who saw Batman Returns and thought that it should be like that. But if you read the comics from the Ultimate Series, the original to the Marvel Knights Series, which is the most edgy young and sexy version, its all very PG and cheeky. It's kind of what differentiates this comic book movie from the Ghost Rider and the X-Men and all of them really.

"It's a family of superheroes -- it's more along the lines of the Incredibles or Shrek."

The new movie introduces one of the most loved characters in the Marvel Universe, the Silver Surfer, a noble and tormented alien who can absorb and manipulate the universe's cosmic energies and rides a funky, flying board. He also has a tendency to destroy planets while being held in the thrall of the god-like entity Galactus and it's up to the Invisible Woman, Mr Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd), the Thing (Michael Chiklis) and the Human Torch (Chris Evans) to stop him. Aussie Julian McMahon also returns as their unsurprisingly not-dead nemesis Viktor Von Doom.

"This time we didn't have to explain three times what we did for a living or what our powers were, so we could really hit the ground running," Alba says.

"We are in the middle of a very chaotic time in their personal lives. Sue and Reed, two superheroes, are getting married, so it's the wedding of the century and it gets crashed by the biggest threat that our world has seen -- the presence of this alien who eats planets and sucks the energy out of them.

"So it was fun to go into the film knowing that that's where the stakes were. And on a personal level of the character -- she is dealing with wanting to be a wife and a mother and not necessarily work all the time. So she is struggling with being a superhero and having the weight of the world on her shoulders."

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