Bruce Willis Tried to Avoid Kissing Jessica Alba in ‘Sin City’

Actors Bruce Willis starred alongside Jessica Alba in the Sin City films directed by Robert Rodriguez. The first Sin City would require Willis and Alba to exchange a passionate kiss. But Willis was initially uneasy about making out with the young star.

How Jessica Alba felt about her on-screen relationship with Bruce Willis in ‘Sin City’

Alba and Willis both starred in the 2005 feature Sin City as Nancy and detective John Hartigan respectively. The movie was adapted from Frank Miller’s graphic novel of the same name, featuring both Willis and Alba in a growing relationship.

Alba was initially attracted to the role because she was excited about the idea of working with filmmaker Robert Rodriguez.

“I just tell my agents every month, ‘What’s Robert doing? I want to do something with him.’ And one of my agents has a relationship with Robert and said, ‘You got an opportunity.’ And I was like, ‘Excellent,'” she once said in an interview with Radio Free.

She won the role after auditioning for the part, where she was paired up with Willis. Willis’ character would already be a grown man by the time he met Alba’s Nancy, who was a child. After a times-skip, Sin City teases a more intimate relationship between Willis’ and Alba’s characters. This raised the question of whether or not Alba felt comfortable with her on-screen romance with Willis.

“Nancy doesn’t think of him as a father,” Alba explained about her character. “She thinks of him as her knight in shining armor. So I just came at it from that point. And she just sort of waited till she was old enough to really be in love with him and have that relationship completely. But I think she always looked at him as her soulmate from the beginning. She’s kind of an old soul from when she’s a little child, and so I didn’t think it was creepy at all.”

Bruce Willis tried to avoid kissing Jessica Alba in ‘Sin City’

Willis originally had his share of concerns about kissing his co-star. Their intimacy wasn’t an issue with Alba, however, as she’d already been accustomed to making out with a variety of on-screen partners.

“It was easy for me. I’ve done a few kisses in my day,” Alba once said according to Female First. “We had this big romantic kiss, and it was supposed to be like this big, epic, beautiful kiss, like you’re anticipating this thing.”

But Willis didn’t share Alba’s attitude, and tried to come up with a reasonable alternative to making out with his partner.

“We finally get to that scene and Bruce is sitting down and I’m going in for the kiss and he goes, ‘Maybe I get up and walk away and she runs after me.’ He says it to Robert when we were shooting it and Robert was like, ‘What?’ He got nervous – Bruce Willis,” Alba remembered.

Alba was both surprised and amused by Willis’ nervousness around the scene.

“It was really cute, ’cause it’s like this man, Die Hard and Moonlighting,” she said.

Jessica Alba once wanted to be Bruce Willis

Alba has often been outspoken about the challenges women have to face in the film industry compared to their male counterparts. It was why Alba didn’t consider other women actors to be her competition.

“I wasn’t competitive with other actresses, I was competitive with male actors,” she explained in an interview with Cosmopolitan (via Metro). “I was like, ‘Why can’t I be the star of an action series? Why can’t I open movies? Why can’t I put asses on seats?'”

Alba would later assert that she didn’t see herself starring in roles that relegated her to being the love interest. She wanted more out of her career.

“I didn’t want to be the women who Bruce Willis was into in Die Hard, I wanted to be Bruce Willis,” she added.