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TIFF 2010

Alba in a scene from Machete (Courtesy of Fox)

It sounds like some sort of time-management voodoo. With a toddler in tow, Jessica Alba claims to have maximized her quality time while doing more movies than ever — four this year alone. The secret: small, but eye-catching parts in lieu of starring roles. In her latest, Robert Rodriguez’s gritty, campy Grindhouse spin-off Machete, she even plays twins, doubling the payoff.

“It was cool, it was crazy, it was fun,” Alba says of Machete during a recent L.A. interview. The film stars craggy-faced Danny Trejo as the title character, a Chicano hired gun who’s double-crossed when he’s assigned to assassinate an immigrant-hating U.S. politician (Robert De Niro), and is based on a fake movie trailer Rodriguez produced as filler between his movie and Quentin Tarantino’s in the B-movie double-bill Grindhouse. Machete’s tagline: “They just fu--ed with the wrong Mexican!”

“I guess he can look dangerous, but not if you know him,” Alba says of Trejo, a character actor who’s played every flavour of bad guy, as well as the not-so-mean inventor Machete Cortez in Rodriguez’s Spy Kids series. “But Danny is fantastic. He’s just the sweetest guy on the planet. He is adorable, absolutely adorable.”

In Machete (a movie with a crazy-quilt of guest stars, including De Niro, Lindsay Lohan and Steven Seagal), Alba plays Sartana, a federal agent who starts out on Machete’s trail with extreme prejudice, but softens toward him when they finally come face-to-face. You can see her in the posters, wearing skin-tight jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, not exactly standard-issue law-enforcement wear.

But there is that twist. “I play identical twins, which was very cool because it gave me a chance to play two different characters,” Alba says. “The main character is an immigration officer and she’s a law-abiding citizen and by the book. The other one, I wouldn’t say she’s evil, but she’s kind of a mess on the other side of the law. She just doesn’t have her stuff together, she’s sloppy and she has problems.”

 

Jessica Alba
  Alba does some soul-searching

In the wings, influencing all of Alba’s career decisions, is two-year-old Honor Marie Warren, her daughter with producer Cash Warren (conceived about the time Alba was in Toronto filming The Love Guru with Mike Myers). “Since she’s been born, I changed everything about how I approach my work,” Alba says. “I mean, I just frankly don’t care if a role’s small or big. I just like working with good directors. That’s sort of been the focus, because if I’m going to spend any time at all away from her, it better be for a good reason.

“As it is, I have four movies coming out this year,” she says. “So I think I worked pretty much as much as I ever want to, for sure.”

Machete is part of a chain of meaty supporting roles that happened almost simultaneously — the better to free her up the rest of the year. She played Ashton Kutcher’s heartbreaker fiancée in Valentine’s Day and filmed a supporting role opposite Ben Stiller in the upcoming Little Fockers, the sequel to Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers, which adds parenthood to the ongoing saga of Gaylord (“Call me Greg”) Focker, his wife Pam (Teri Polo) and their in-laws. As the story begins, Greg and Pam are the parents of five-year-old twins, and Greg is suffering a mid-life crisis.

“I actually shot two movies at the same time all the way through Valentine’s Day,” Alba says. “Valentine’s Day was two-and-a-half months of a couple of days at a time. I was shooting Machete all the way through the beginning. And I started Meet the Little Fockers as Valentine’s Day was finishing.”

Apparently some juvenile puns never get old. Just saying the name of Stiller’s movie still makes Alba laugh (the title has been shortened simply to Little Fockers since we spoke).

In Little Fockers — which sees the return of Barbra Streisand as Greg’s mom and Robert De Niro and Blythe Danner as Pam’s parents — Alba plays a pharmaceutical sales rep. “And you know, Ben Stiller’s character is a male nurse, so let’s say we have a lot of interaction in this movie. I don’t want to get in trouble by giving away too much.

“I will say my character’s hilarious and very eccentric, like a guy’s girl. She’s tough and funny, she’s like a dude.”

Which speaks to what Alba enjoys most in a role, and why Machete was clearly her favourite experience in that flurry of parts.

While the media has tended to concentrate on Alba’s looks — she topped Maxim’s Hot List, was one of People’s 50 Most Beautiful People, repeatedly ranks near the top of FHM magazine’s 100 Sexiest Women, and GQ pronounced her one of the “25 Sexiest Women in film of all time” — she’s a self-proclaimed tomboy. Her standing as a sex symbol doesn’t seem all that important to her.

“I really don’t take myself all that seriously, so I don’t take that stuff all that seriously,” she says. The unspoken truth is that it also represents a possible impediment to the kind of dramatic stretching she’d like to do down the road. “Hot” is fleeting, after all.

And she’s a sucker for an action role. She was, of course, plucked from obscurity by James Cameron himself to star in his sci-fi TV series "Dark Angel," a kick-butt debut that led to her tenure as Sue Storm (a.k.a. the Invisible Girl) in two Fantastic Four movies. “I finally get to play full-out action again,” she says of her gun-toting turn in Machete. “I mean, I always played sports and was a total tomboy growing up. And all my friends were guys, pretty much until I was an adult.”

Beyond that, she says, “I’m kind of just enjoying spending time with my daughter, savouring my time off and trying to balance it all. When you work all the time, you miss such milestones in their lives, especially at this age.”

 Jim Slotek writes for the Toronto Sun.

 

Eli Roth
  Eli Roth as a 'basterd'

Hope it’s no turkey

If all goes well Machete won’t be the only fake trailer from Grindhouse to get its own feature film. Actor (Inglourious Basterds) and director (Hostel) Eli Roth, who helmed the fake trailer for Thanksgiving, is working on a script to turn the holiday-themed horror flick parody into a full-length film. Expect a lot of cheese in this Thanksgiving feast, which managed to squeeze all of the following witticisms into its two-and-a-half-minute trailer: “This holiday season prepare to have the stuffing scared out of you;” “This year there will be no leftovers;” “White meat, dark meat, all will be carved;” “Arrive hungry. Leave stuffed;” and “Thanksgiving. You’ll come home for the holidays...in a body bag.”
—Marni Weisz



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