On her desire to play Sin City‘s sultry stripper Nancy Callahan, the sexiest woman in Kadee’s Club Pecos:
Jessica Alba: “I wanted to do this movie because Robert Rodriguez was directing it, first and foremost. I didn’t really know it was a comic book when I saw he was directing something. I just tell my agents every month ‘What’s Robert doing? I want to do something with him.’ And one of my agents has a relationship with Robert and he said ‘You’ve got an opportunity.’ And I said ‘Excellent’ and I took that opportunity and ran with it. I auditioned the old fashioned way. I went in for the casting director, put myself on tape and he had to approve, and it was like a week of ‘Does he think I suck? I just don’t want him to think I suck. I don’t even care if I get the role, I just don’t want Robert to think I suck.’ And he didn’t think I sucked.
On the fact that the film is a near-perfect recreation of the original comic book images, yet while her character appears topless in the film, Jessica stayed inside her cowgirl-stripper outfit:
Jessica Alba: “She was bottomless, too! I looked at the graphic novel and I saw the picture and I then found out she was a stripper, she was bottomless and topless. You know, the nudity was an option. We could have done it if we wanted to. Robert said we could do it if we wanted to, and obviously it would have been more authentic, but I felt like dancing around with a lasso and chaps was going to be sexy enough. I think being nude, for me, would have been distracting and I couldn’t, I REALLY couldn’t be bottomless, for my dad–He would really, I don’t know, disown me or something. He’d freak out.”
Robert Rodriguez commentary: “It was important that we retain the sexiness of it. And that people, like in the comics–all of the people think Nancy is the sexiest person in the world. And you did that. That’s all we needed. This works and gets that across.”
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On the positive changes she’s seen in Hollywood as an actress of Latin heritage:
Jessica Alba: “It’s a lot different for me, because I only used to get breakdowns for Maria, the janitor’s daughter who was messing around with the white kid, and it would be such a classist, bizarre thing. I grew up in the United States. My mother’s white, my father’s Mexican, and my father’s very dark and my mother’s very fair, and I came out how I did, and they always want to pigeonhole you, and it’s bizarre. We’re just people living in society. I don’t think about it until people make me think about it, and this industry definitely MADE me think about me being a Latin girl, up until I was 18 and I did Dark Angel and Jim [Cameron] basically said ‘You’re the future of the race.’ That’s basically what Dark Angel was, where you’re just a mixture and we’re not going to talk about it, and it’s done, and you’re just a human being going through the struggle of whatever you’re going through on your journey. So now it’s very liberating, working with people who aren’t going to pigeonhole you as the janitor’s daughter.”
On the more than father-figure feelings her character, who is saved as a child by Haritgan (Bruce Willis), has for the much-older cop:
Jessica Alba: “Nancy doesn’t think of him as a father. She thinks of him as her knight in shining armor. So I just came at it from that point, and she just sort of waited until she was old enough to really be in love with him and have that relationship completely. But I think she always looked at him as her soul mate from the beginning, She’s kind of an old soul from when she’s a little child and talking with him and reasoning with him, and saying she’s going to write him and so I didn’t think it was creepy at all.”
Robert Rodriguez commentary: “It’s a great love story. He doesn’t realize that she’s growing over the ages, she’s the only person there for him while he’s in prison and when he comes out . Frank got the idea because he was at his mother’s house and this beautiful woman walks in and he’s thinking ‘Oh my God,’ and she turns around and says ‘Hi, Uncle Frank!’ and now he’s like ‘Oh my God, my little niece has grown up! I feel like such a heel for looking at her.’ But she became a woman in front of his eyes – he hadn’t seen her in years. That’s where he got the idea for it.”
On whether working primarily on a green screen set, with the film’s stunning backgrounds to be added digitally later, was intimidating or creatively freeing:
Jessica Alba: “I’m not very experienced with theater, except for my only training I ever had was with David Mamet‘s theater company, the Atlantic Theater Company, and that’s all I did was go on the full stage and imagine things, but they were in small rooms and you had to shout and project your voice and everything. With Robert it’s very specific and he fine-tunes your performance, so it’s kind of a marriage of film and theater, I felt.”
On seeing all of the film’s visual elements assembled together on screen for the first time:
Jessica Alba: “I just felt like I was a little line in this piece of music. It was beautiful from beginning to end–I want to rewind it and see the whole thing over again, because I don’t think I got to really have all the images that I want in my mind. There was so much, it was so visual and overwhelming. It was great.”
On the effect of taking direction from two directors on the set:
Jessica Alba: “It was very self-indulgent, I think. We just got to talk each director’s ear off about our characters and we kinda really like talking about characters we play and ourselves-because we’re all really kind of narcissistic. [laughs]”
On preparing for the highly physical role of Nancy Callahan, in which she dances in chaps, twirls a lariat and spins six-shooters on her fingers:
Jessica Alba: “I work out anyway, because it’s healthy to work out. When you have health problems–especially in my family–I just work out just to be healthy anyway, so that was already part of it. And I went to strip clubs to see how strippers do it. And I wanted a choreographer, and Robert said no. ‘Just feel it. We’re just going to play music and just feel it.'”
Robert Rodriguez commentary: “I wanted it to come from you. I didn’t want it to be dance moves. I did that with Salma Hayek in From Dusk Till Dawn, she wanted a choreographer, said ‘I don’t want to dance this,’ and I said ‘I don’t want you doing dance moves. I want something a little more womanly-”
Jessica Alba: “Mind you, he’s saying Salma Hayek in From Dusk Till Dawn, the sexiest dance I’ve ever seen on camera, EVER. And he’s like ‘It’ll be like that.’ ‘Like THAT? Are you serious? I have to live up to something. It’s iconic-there hasn’t been a sexier dance ever, and she wasn’t naked, and she was just gorgeous.”
Robert Rodriguez commentary: “She was very nervous. She was just there–you do it and you go up there, and you know how to dance. It’s going to be something people WISH they could choreograph.”
Jessica Alba: “He says that, but my heart was beating so fast. I was so nervous! Then I had some Texans teach me how to rope and lasso, spin the guns–”
Robert Rodriguez commentary: “She whacked herself in the head a few times.”
On how her next comic book-inspired potential blockbuster, Fantastic Four, and her role as Susan Storm, the Invisible Girl, is a radical departure from Sin City:
Jessica Alba: “Fantastic Four couldn’t be more different. Fantastic Four is a family movie. I play a scientist who has difficulty expressing her emotions. And her DNA was altered, so when she does express her emotions she goes invisible. So when she’s screaming, she goes invisible, when she’s having a meltdown, she goes invisible, when she’s frustrated. And the man that she’s in love with ignores her, and she goes invisible. So it’s very big, a huge movie for Fox, and a lot of pressure that it does well.”
n her reasons for appearing in the upcoming underwater adventure Into the Blue:
Jessica Alba: “I did that a long time ago. Jim Cameron has been kind of talking about doing a comic book that involves scuba diving–Fathom, this girl underwater-and I had been talking to him about possibly doing something like that, and this movie came up and I hadn’t scuba dived for seven months, and they were going to give me a decent paycheck to scuba dive in the Bahamas for five months. And I was like ‘Cool.’ That was why I did that.”
On whether she’s actively planning to play Fathom, another comic book-inspired role, for Cameron:
Jessica Alba: “No, no. It was just something that we’ve talked about. We talk about a lot of things. I just thought I didn’t scuba dive in seven years and I should brush up on it. It’s just a good skill to have.”
On whether Cameron’s contacted her to star in his planned next film, the sci-fi thriller Battle Angel, based on yet another comic book, the Japanese manga Battle Angel Alita:
Jessica Alba: “No, he hasn’t talked to me about that yet.”
On her sudden career explosion on the big screen, with three films opening within months of each other in 2005, and whether she’s ready to be elevated to a whole new level of fame:
Jessica Alba: “I’ve been doing this for 11 years, and it definitely isn’t an overnight thing, and if people then know about me, then great-I don’t act for myself, or else I would just act in front of a mirror. So I actually like having an audience of people who are being affected by stuff that I’m in. I love entertaining. They just all happen to come out this year, and the more the merrier, I think.”
Robert Rodriguez commentary: “I first met you when you came in for The Faculty. She was like 16, she looked kind of dorky, skinny and scrawny-she was so cute … and now she’s like almost not that person.”
Jessica Alba: “That’s embarrassing!”
