Thanks to Taylor for finding this article in the Vancouver periodical

In Today's Globe and Mail (Vancouver Paper)

Superhero, sex kitten, and tired of it all
She may be a prime-time celebrity and media sensation. But between barely stifled yawns, Jessica Alba tells ALEXANDRA GILL that being a breakout star isn't all it's cracked up to be.

ALEXANDRA GILL

Wednesday, March 28, 2001

VANCOUVER -- Jessica Alba normally enters a room -- or lusty imagination -- lips first.

Her pillowy pout, currently swelling off magazine covers, billboards, L'Oréal commercials and a sea of obsessive Internet fan sites, is an undeniably huge part of the reason that 12 million viewers a week are tuning in to Dark Angel.

In a season of new TV programming that was even more bleak than the crumbling squats and rubble-strewn streets of Dark Angel's postapocalyptic Seattle shoreline, Alba's high-gloss pucker has shone like a bright beacon to the young, channel-surfing masses.

The series, co-created by the Oscar-winning Titanic director James Cameron, has already anchored itself as the Fox network's most successful sci-fi show since The X-Files, recently capturing the People's Choice Award for Favorite New Dramatic Series. And 19-year-old Alba, virtually unknown before she slipped into her character's skintight bodysuit and world-weary smirk, sailed away from last month's TV Guide Awards as the Breakout Star of the Year.

Today, however, those famously oversized lips are somewhat less distracting than the sound of Alba's clunky sneakers, thudding through a dimly lit warehouse at Vancouver's Lions Gate Studios.

Clomp. Clomp. Clomp. After a year and a half of intense physical training, and months of 85-hour workweeks, the fun of being a superaction hero is beginning to wear thin. Her hips are sore from three hours of cardio and weight training a day and she's tired of talking to the press.

Clomp. Clomp. Clomp. Alba drags herself out of the makeup room and over to the apartment set with all the enthusiasm of a shackled prisoner being led off to hard labour.

In Dark Angel, Alba's character is a genetically revved human prototype able to dodge bullets at hyperspeed and spy into distant highrises with her telescopic vision. Named Max, she escaped her military handlers at the age of nine, but is still haunted by flashbacks of her tormented youth and the fear that a barcode tattooed on the back of her neck might be reaching its expiry date. A sullen bicycle courier by day and nimble cat burglar by night, Max manuevers her Kawasaki Ninja 350 through a dark world devastated by an electromagnetic pulse bomb as she searches for her long-lost test-tube siblings, and reluctantly helps out an underground cyber journalist.

Perhaps all that crashing through glass windows and carrying the weight of the show on her newly pumped shoulders is taking its toll on the actress. Alba slumps down in a chair, appearing to be completely sapped of the feline DNA that fuels Max's superhuman grace. She and co-star Michael Weatherly, who in real life plays Alba's off-screen boyfriend, rehearse their lines as the lighting and camera technicians prepare the scene.

When the director calls them to take their places, Weatherly jumps up and assists Alba to her feet by reaching out for her hand and lifting it to his mouth for a kiss. Alba just stares at him blankly before letting her arm flop to her side. She chugs a gulp of water from her bottle, leans over a garbage can, spits out her gum and heads over to the set. Clomp. Clomp. Clomp.

Alba and Weatherly, who is 32 and has a five-year-old son, have politely refused to discuss their relationship with the press. "My job is entertainment," Alba later explains. "My personal life isn't ... It's not my job to tell people about my personal life. It's my job to do interviews and learn my lines."

Despite her apparent lethargy, Alba is doing her job much better than Weatherly this morning. "God damn it," he groans, banging his fist on the desk after flubbing his lines for the sixth take. Weatherly is apparently having trouble imbuing the words with the proper weight of despair. His character has, after all, just discovered that the woman he loves is a sociopath who once ripped someone to pieces with her teeth when she was a child.

But Alba never loses her patience. She can empathize. "After 18 shows, that's what happens," she explains, when the first three-minute scene of the day is finally wrapped at about noon. As she slumps into another chair stationed in the show's dark, empty-bar set and burrows into a long, puffy parka, she elaborates: "I can't even tell you how many times we've been at that desk, doing dialogue, running up people on the computer. We've done this like 60,000 times, whatever. It just all becomes mumble."

Between yawns, Alba goes on to explain how much fun she's not having. She hasn't any time to see Vancouver, she notes -- not that there's much to see. "It's all rainy," she sulks.

And she can just barely stand the hand-to-hand combat demanded by her role -- and then, only if she's working with stunt people, not actors. "Actors are more sensitive and you feel so bad because it's inevitable that they're going to get smacked around. You're punching and kicking and turning and spinning. God forbid your hand isn't in the right place or they didn't duck at the right time -- you smack 'em in the face."

The highwire work, which involves leaping from tall buildings, is the worst, "because you feel like you can't breathe up there. And it has to be tight enough so that it doesn't put all the weight on your hips or ribs."

But none of that is nearly as bad as doing interviews.

"People always ask, 'What is it like being you? What is it like being sexy? What is it like being the desire of all men's fantasies?' How do you answer that? It's like, 'Oh, yeah. It's great. I love being on the cover of Maxim magazine, freezing my butt off, half-naked in sand that was cutting into my skin. That was fun.' "

Alba hasn't had a weekend to herself in the last six weeks because of publicity commitments. As a result, she says, she's sometimes feels as if she's losing her sense of herself.

"Journalists just want to see a piece of you that will fit their story. It seems like most of the journalists I've met already have the story, and they just want quotes that they can fill in."

But she is philosophical about the process. "That's just their job and I
understand that," she adds. "So I have to try to give them what they want."

In return, she's able to play off her newfound fame, padding her once-lean résumé -- which had included guest spots on Beverly Hills 90210, a short-lived Flipper revival and a handful of supporting roles in such feature films as Never Been Kissed and Idle Hands -- with larger leading roles, including The Sleeping Dictionary, which she filmed last summer in Malaysia with Bob Hoskins.

And while she may indeed sound a mite jaded, it's only fair to point out that Alba has been working hard at her career for almost half her young life. Her father was a U.S. Air Force staff sergeant and the family moved around about eight or nine times before settling in Claremont, Calif.

When she was 12, Alba won the grand prize in an acting competition, which paid for a summer of drama classes her parents couldn't afford.

She has since studied the Meisner technique with David Mamet's Atlantic Theater Company under the tutelage of William H. Macy. "I wasn't patient enough to just work for the next four years and figure it out on my own," she says of the training.

Cameron has said that Alba stood out from the 1,000-plus applicants he screened for Dark Angel partly because she was intriguingly unrecognizable, partly because of her cockiness and partly because of her "transgenic" appearance. The last of those traits is no doubt partly the result of her hyphenated heritage. Her father is Spanish, her grandmother was Québécois and there's also some Dutch and Italian in the family tree. The result -- wavy black hair, olive skin and dark, sultry eyes -- is exotically enigmatic.

But whatever she may look like on the outside, and however exhausted she may
feel from the demands of her role in Dark Angel, Alba says she can hardly regret ending up where she has.

"I've always given 100 per cent of myself," she says. "That's how I got where I am. I knew what I wanted to do when I was 12, and I went for it.

"And that's what's great about Max. She doesn't think anything's out of her reach. She thinks anything can happen, too. That's probably how we're similar. And she doesn't apologize for herself either. She just is who she is. And if someone has a problem with it, that's their problem."

Spoken like a true superhero.