“A jolly good film like ‘American Pie’: The Bollywood sex comedy that almost starred Jessica Alba
In today’s instalment of ‘actors who were absolutely massive and world famous in the 2000s and then seemingly vanished off the face of the earth’, let’s take a look at Jessica Alba, which lets face it, is never really a chore, and more specifically her surprising flirtation with Indian cinema that never really took off.
It’s not hyperbole to say that between 2000 and 2010, Alba was one of the most in-demand and lusted after female cinema stars in the world, having successfully got the internet comic book nerds feverishly grasping snacks and wringing at their collars with the James Cameron-created sci-fi series Dark Angel and using it to propel herself to Hollywood fame.
Building on Cameron’s movie habit of promoting strong, action-ready women, Dark Angel was a drama featuring Alba as a futuristic super soldier called Max with all kinds of crazy combat skills, having been raised in a secret government institution with 11 other talented kids before escaping…hang on a second…this sounds very familiar. Somebody call the Duffer brothers immediately, I have questions.
Anyway, back to Alba, who after two years on the show appeared in a street dance film called Honey, which critics didn’t enjoy too much but made decent money at the box office and she then had a huge couple of years thanks to her roles in Robert Rodriguez’s 2005 comic book noir Sin City with Mickey Rourke and Bruce Willis, and then Marvel’s first attempt at The Fantastic Four. Between them, the two films grossed more than half a billion dollars, and Alba adorned bedroom walls across the globe.
After another turn as Sue Storm in the Fantastic Four sequel and a string of comedies, including Good Luck Chuck and Mike Myers The Love Guru, which genuinely might be one of the worst films ever made, Alba also attracted the attention of Bollywood, which, lest we forget, actually produces more films than Hollywood and annually sells more tickets worldwide.
Originally, producers in India wanted her to appear in a film called Rave Party, an abandoned project which, according to the would-be director, Venkat Prabhu, was “a jolly good film like American Pie or Road Trip. It is about a gang of friends who go to Goa on holiday, get stuck in a perilous situation, but emerge unscathed”.
There were rumours at the time that salary might be an issue with Alba reportedly asking for a wage more than double the film’s entire budget, but this was denied, with the film’s marketing officer saying, “Jessica is not doing the film because it wasn’t possible to rework our schedule around her dates”.
In the end, the movie was stuck in production hell and then was scrapped, while Alba instead made a Michael Winterbottom film co-starring Casey Affleck called The Killer Inside Me, a crime noir set in the 1950s that proved controversial due to the portrayed levels of violence against women, noteable more so because it was originally going to be a Quentin Tarantino movie in the 1990s, with Pulp Fiction’s Uma Thurman attached to star alongside Brad Pitt.
However, years went by, and eventually, the script was deemed too violent even for Tarantino, who scrapped it, but unfortunately for Alba, she was nominated for a Golden Raspberry for the film, a feat she repeated on three other films in four years.
