The “safe, boring” movies Jessica Alba will always regret making: “I take full responsibility for that”
Each generation of heterosexual young men has one female celebrity who ascends to the very top of their adolescent fantasies, and for one such generation of hormonally confused teenagers, that woman was Jessica Alba.
Both on and off the screen, Alba was presented as the ultimate object of desire, but unfortunately, her popularity with certain demographics didn’t always translate to onscreen quality. Following her breakout role in the dance film Honey, Alba went on to star in a number of movies that, while financially successful, were dragged by critics, like her two outings as Susan ‘The Invisible Woman’ Storm in Tim Story’s Fantastic Four films, which mean a lot to a certain audience (myself included), but aren’t held up as masterpieces by any regard.
She has had her fair share of rotten romcoms, terrible thrillers, and awful action flicks to her name, but if you think I’m being harsh about her career, you should hear what she has to say about it.
Alba has been very honest about some of her biggest releases in recent years, noting how she didn’t enjoy working on Fantastic Four, particularly due to the humiliating scene where she had to get naked. However, in an interview with Marie Claire in 2014, she questioned some of the decisions she made in her younger days.
“I don’t know if I was ever typecast, but I just made very safe, boring choices as an actor, and I take full responsibility for that,” she said (via Yahoo! Entertainment), “It wasn’t the roles. It was probably the way I translated them. I was afraid to be fearless and bold. I was young, I was afraid of being criticised, and I wanted to appease everyone.”
This sort of honesty is incredibly rare from an A-lister, but I think Alba is also being hard on herself, because there’s always been unfair expectations on famous women in Hollywood, which was especially true during her peak years.
The noughties were not a particularly feminist time in mainstream cinema, especially if you looked the way Alba did, wherein so many of her characters were reduced to little more than eye candy or love interests for the male lead to pursue. She has spoken about how much she enjoyed movies like Sin City, where she got to play characters with a bit of edge, but these were unfortunately few and far between.
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Over the past decade or so, Alba has significantly reduced the number of films she appears in, only appearing in three movies since 2017, with a fourth currently in post-production, and instead has dedicated a lot of that time to her business pursuits and charitable endeavours.
It’s sad to see anyone get burnt out by the Hollywood system, but at least Alba has managed to land on her feet and use her fame to do something she loves. However, her story is similar to so many young women whose trajectories didn’t turn out so fortunately; beauty might seem like an advantage in the acting business, but it can also be a major burden.
