In the Elle

Despite an ever-growing baby bump, Jessica Alba might still be mistaken for a pin-up girl—But as Andrew Goldman can tell you, there's no mistaking her career savvy or her ladylike focus on what matters most.

“I'm reading this dumb book, and it's getting in my head,” Jessica Alba says, as she digs through her giant studded Gerard Darel bag and pulls out a white hardcover buried among the bottles of acidophilus and chlorella supplements that have been rattling around in there for about a month, since she embarked on a new no caffeine or booze, endless glasses of water, truckloads of fruits and vegetables regimen. “I was so nauseous reading this while I was on the bike today,” she says. What emerges is Skinny Bitch, the pro-vegan diatribe masquerading as a chick-lit diet book that became an instant best-seller when Victoria Beckham was photographed carrying it. As Alba reads from the chapter concerning slaughterhouses, it's clear why seared loins haven't quite tasted so succulent since her trainer Ramona gave her the book. “Stunned or not,” she reads, “cows and hogs are then 'strung up' from the ceiling by a chain attached to their legs. In theory, while they dangle there, they are supposed to be unconscious. But often they are fully conscious, struggling, screaming, and fearfully staring at the workers while they have their throats stabbed open.” Alba peers up at me, mouth agape, then buries her nose in the book and describes the work of the wretched souls whose résumés include the words head skinner.

It's worth noting that Alba and I are not taking a break from picketing a Hormel plant, but sitting in the back of Sur La Table, the gourmet kitchenware store, near the Farmers Market in Los Angeles. We've just completed a private class in Mediterranean cooking, and those tender lamb kebabs dipped in pomegranate sauce sitting in our bellies are now conjuring visions of a woolly creature rolling around a pasture in a wheelchair. Even that cornmeal olive-oil cake with calvados-sautéed apples had milk, which, the Skinny Bitch authors remind us, contains traces of rocket fuel and udder pus. But Alba resides in a pragmatic world. When it came down to it, however cruel and toxic the meal, she did exactly what was expected with a writer and cooking teacher eyeballing her: She ate the goddamn food, and even managed to pronounce it “delicious.”

Alba has for some time been publicly chafing at her image as a staggeringly beautiful girl who lands atop any poll that measures men's arousal but has never attracted critical adulation for her acting. And the choked-down meal suggests what it might have felt like for her, a 12-year show business veteran, to stand on a stage last August next to pubescent High School Musical star Zac Efron and appear truly psyched to accept an unwieldy surfboard for being voted “Teen Choice Female Hottie of the Year.” A friend of mine related a story about watching Alba at ShoWest, the annual Las Vegas schmoozefest for movie theater owners, where she was promoting Fantastic Four. Alba, who posed for picture after picture with a long line of schlubby exhibitors, would beam as the flashbulb went off, and when the theater owner was lead away, her face would fall into a look of misery. As soon as the next guy was in place, she'd be ready with another electric smile.

“Jessica is very strategic in the way she approaches her career,” says John Stockwell, who directed her in 2005's Into the Blue. “She's not a bubbleheaded Maxim bikini babe. Look, she understands you have to do certain things to get to certain places, and when she's had enough of it, she'll use that position of being on those hot lists to get to a different level.”

So she didn't do all those self-deprecating bits as host of the 2006 MTV Movie Awards just for the fun of it? Nope. “I couldn't get seen for a comedy to save my life,” Alba says. She took the gig to show the industry that she could be funny. And largely because of that onstage goofing, Dane Cook, sitting in the audience, chose her to play his clumsy inamorata in last year's Good Luck Chuck, which, considering the critical excoriation the film received, might seem like a wash, or worse, for Alba—that is, until you consider the bigger picture. “I saw her interviewed and saw a silly freeness,” Mike Myers says. “Then when I saw the Good Luck Chuck trailers, that confirmed my initial thought that she'd be funny.” And now she is playing the owner of a cursed hockey team in Myers' big summer tent pole, The Love Guru, which Alba predicts will be a new Austin Powers-scale franchise.

The day before our cooking class, at lunch in Beverly Hills, Alba's eyes almost roll out of her head when the subject of the Teen Choice award comes up. Of meeting Efron, she says, “He looks like a child with a lot of makeup. I was like, 'My God, you're just a little kid.'” Alba, however, will be 27 in April, a milestone she seems to be approaching with all the enthusiasm of a cat being ushered through the gates of a water park. “I'm anticipating it,” she says lugubriously. “I'm feeling old, yes…27 was when Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, and Jim Morrison all died.” It doesn't take long to notice just how far Alba is from the seductress you would suspect her to be after sampling the Internet's vast collection of her cheesecake shots. (How much gravitas can any woman muster in a bikini?) Add to that all those profiles in men's magazines depicting her as an expert flirt about one glass of cabernet away from jumping the writers' bones.

Over lunch, the vibe she gives off is a lot more sober CEO than purring sex kitten. “I think there are ambitious girls who will do anything to be famous, and they think men in this business are used to women doing that,” Alba says. “Contrary to how people may feel, I've never used my sexuality. That's not part of it for me. When I'm in a meeting, I want to tell you why I'm an asset, how I'm a commodity, how I can put asses in the seats, not, 'There's a chance you're going to be able to fuck me.' That's never been my deal.” To illustrate, she mentions a conversation she had with Frank Miller, the graphic novelist and codirector of 2005's Sin City, in which she played the stripper Nancy Callahan, who, thanks to a firm no-nudity clause in Alba's contract, never doffs her studded leather bra. “It wasn't even something I was at all aware of before Frank pointed that out. He said, 'You never use your sexuality at all. You never even throw that card in the mix. You're the only actress I've ever met who doesn't do that.'”

But she certainly has a ready arsenal of sex appeal at her disposal, even if she chooses not to engage it. She's wearing a black slipdress on this 90-plus-degree October day, because, she says with characteristic bluntness, “It's hot as balls outside.” Photos can't begin to replicate what it's like to be in close proximity to her full upper lip, which got her teased as a kid but helped land her on the pages of Seventeen at age 12. To behold that lip's grandeur is to finally understand the ideal those aging actresses are pursuing when they collagen themselves to the point of resembling trout. Though she describes her body as “relatable” to regular women—comparing her own curves to those of Halle Berry, Beyoncé, and Jennifer Lopez—Alba is definitively slight; her lithe, twiggy arms and long, slender fingers making her more serpentine than bodacious.

Her body has served her perhaps too well. “Jessica will have to do something like what Charlize Theron did with Monster in order to get people to pay attention to what a good actor she is,” says Stockwell, who for Into the Blue shot Alba and costar Paul Walker in swimwear for three months. “Executives at MGM could barely focus on what was happening on the screen because they were so distracted by how good she looked in a bikini. I would literally get notes saying, 'Hey, why did you cut that one shot of Jessica swimming by?'” Walker seems to have been similarly taken when he told a reporter in 2006 that “I couldn't take my eyes off that ass. I'm sorry. She's beautiful,” and went on to describe Alba not as the consummate actress, but rather as “the kind of girl you want to have angry sex with for the rest of your life.” Nice. 

Source: elle