DARK VICTORY BY JOSH
ROTTENBERG As the genetically engineered mad Max on the hit series DARK ANGEL, Jessica Alba comes on strong Somehow, the bar at Los
Angeles’s St. Regis hotel isn’t the first place you’d
expect to meet Jessica Alba, star of Fox’s new sci-fi series Dark
Angel. Maybe it’s the fact
that, at the age of 19, Alba isn’t old enough to knock back anything
harder than her chamomile tea. Or perhaps it’s just that this swanky
bar, with its elegant high-backed chairs and $175 cognacs, lacks the grungy
postapocalyptic ambience in which Alba, as Dark Angel’s brooding, genetically souped-up heroine,
Max, looks so at home. Put it this way: Ask Max to shell out 17 bucks for a
shrimp cocktail, and you’d probably be answered with a boot in the
teeth. Alba
awoke at five o’clock this November morning in Vancouver, Canada, where
the series is filmed, and caught an early flight to L.A. for a photo shoot.
Now, 14 hours and countless pouty poses later, she’s clearly wiped out. Max
may be a relentless one-woman weapons system, but the actress who plays her
is a mere mortal, and the continuous care and feeding of the publicity
monster is taking its toll. “In the past four months, I’ve done
23 photo shoots, plus I work full-time,” says a sweats-clad Alba, who,
despite reports linking her with costar Michael Weatherly (Logan Cale),
declares she has no time for a love life. “I’m kind of over
it.” Maybe
so, but it’s not over yet. Since Dark Angel’s October 3 debut, which won record
Tuesday-night ratings for Fox (9 P.M./ET), the series has been the center of
some of network TV’s most intense hype, and hope, this season. A number
of gloomy, paranoiac science-fiction series have come and gone (Fox’s Millennium an Harsh Realm, to name just two) since The X-Files first marked the spot seven years ago. But Dark
Angel—which chronicles the
crusade of bar-coded bike messenger Max and underground allies like Original
Cindy (Valarie Rae Miller) against various villains—has two strong
factors in its favor. The
first is the stamp of creator and executive producer James Cameron, the
blockbuster film director (“Titanic,” as well as the futuristic
“Aliens” and the two “Terminator” movies); Dark
Angel marks his first TV
venture. The second is Alba, whose appeal should be self explanatory to
anyone with working eyeballs. According
to Dark Angel’s back
story, recounted in flashbacks, Alba’s character was created by a
sinister secret military program, but it could just as well have been a savvy
Hollywood marketing department (see “Under the Influence”). Like
Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy before her, motorcycle mama Max blends
action-hero chops with sex-kitten appeal in a single potent package—one
that Fox hopes will lure back younger viewers who may have drifted over to WB
with the demise of Party of Five
and Beverly Hills, 90210. “Creating
a strong female character is a no-lose deal,” says Cameron, who, along
with Alba, insists he’s never seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer (its spin-off, Angel, competes in the same time slot on WB).
“Women like it more, and it certainly doesn’t hurt the male
audience. I’ve definitely found that with my feature films.” (A
few hardcore sci-fi buffs on the Internet have claimed Max bears a close
resemblance to the female protagonist of Robert Heinlein’s 1982 novel Friday; she’s another genetically engineered
courier-superhero. But while acknowledging he has “read everything
Heinlein wrote,” Cameron says, “I never really thought of that
before.”) The
all-but-unknown Alba faced stiff competition for Dark Angel’s coveted lead, with 1,000 young women
vying for the chance to be anointed by hit maker Cameron. But she insists she
was never fazed or intimidated by the director’s taskmaster reputation.
“Everyone tried to freak me out before I met Jim,” she says.
“You know, ‘This is the big time, king of the world, yada, yada,
yada.’ And I’m just like, ‘He’s just a human being.
And I’m no different than I was yesterday.’” It
was this self-assurance that captivated Cameron and series co-creator and
executive producer Charles Eglee, whose credits include Murder One and Moonlighting. “We had to look someone in the eye and
say, ‘Can you carry this stone up the mountain?’” Cameron
says. “Because otherwise the whole thing is just a waste of time.
Jessica had the spirit to make this thing work.” Then
again, it didn’t hurt that, with her down-pillow lips and almond-shaped
eyes, Alba looks like someone fabricated out of the human genome’s
greatest hits. “Because Max was engineered from a spectrum of DNA, she
sort of looks like everybody,” Eglee notes. “But you can’t
put a finger on it.” While
some have made much of her Hispanic roots, Alba, who was raised mainly in
suburban Southern California with younger brother Josh, is the product of a
mixed heritage. Her father, Mark, a former Air Force man who owns a
real-estate company, is Mexican-American, whil her mother, Cathy, who devotes
herself to her daughter’s career, is of French-Canadian and Danish
descent. “I feel like I’d be lying if I said I’m a Latina,”
Alba says. “I just think I represent America. But people like to label
things. It’s fine.” Ironically,
Alba’s now-vaunted combination of exotic looks and flinty toughness (in
fifth grade, she reports, she punched a kid in the face because “he
touched my butt”) led to some trouble landing jobs when she was
younger. The actress, whose performing instincts surfaced early, says she was
often deemed “too ethnic” for commercials. “Plus, I
wasn’t cheery enough,” she says. “I couldn’t do that sort
of ‘Trident tastes great!’ “I
was like, ‘Why should I be smiling all the damn time?’”
Ultimately, Alba’s first breakthrough came at age 12 with a small role
in the movie “Camp Nowhere,” followed by a stint on the updated Flipper, appearances on Beverly Hills, 90210 and two 199 films, “Idle Hands” and
Drew Barrymore’s “Never Been Kissed.” At
this point, even as those around her whisper glittering predictions of things
to come, Alba regards all the hype with a jaded detachment worthy of Max.
“Anybody can be famous,” she says. “It’s just a
matter of whether you believe what they tell you.” Cameron agrees:
“I think that’s a healthy place for Jessica to be. TV is a highly
Darwinian world. She’s got t keep her nose to the grindstone. No
sooner has Alba finished shrugging off the tantalizing charms of stardom than
a hotel employee appears at the table. “Sorry to bother you,” she
tells the actress, “but apparently your spa appointment has been
changed from 8:30 to 8.” Alba smiles sheepishly, like a professed vegan
caught chomping into a Big Mac. “My producer gave me a massage to
celebrate our getting picked up for nine more episodes,” she explains.
There’s no need to apologize, of course. After all, she’s only
human. Josh
Rottenberg frequently writes for TV GUIDE Ultimate Cable |
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