Jessica Alba Once Recalled Intense Shoot on ‘Dark Angel’
Actor Jessica Alba once co-starred alongside ex-boyfriend Michael Weatherly in James Cameron’s sci-fi series Dark Angel. And as is usually the case when an actor works with Cameron, the role took Alba to her physical limits.
Jessica Alba barely saw sunlight when she did ‘Dark Angel’
Alba’s Dark Angel days could be grueling to say the least. She was only 19-years-old when she was cast as cyborg Max Guevara. Yet, she worked harder on the series than she even did in some of her films. So much so that looking back on it, Alba wasn’t sure how she managed to live up to the show’s impossible tasks.
“Dark Angel was intense for me. It was impossible for me. I worked on the weekends, 10 ½ months a year, in the cold, in Vancouver; with night shoots 4 to 5 days a week. I would leave at dark after working and come back at dark and then it was raining,” Alba once said according to Black Film.
According to Closer Weekly, Alba went into a little more detail about her work schedule in an unpublished interview. There, Alba was really able to describe in detail the daily minutia of her work.
“I have to get up at 6:30 so I can work out from 7:00 to 8:30, then I have to run back to my house, take a shower so I can get picked up at 8:45 — which I’m usually five to eight minutes later for, and my driver probably isn’t the happiest man in the world — then I have to get my butt to set, go straight into makeup,” Alba said. “I eat my breakfast while I get my hair and make-up done and in the middle of that I have to go and get pulled for rehearsals, come back and change and go on to the set.”
“I’m there all day until about 11:00 at night when they say we’ve lost our location and there’s no way we can shoot anything else, and start it all over again,” she added about the shoot. “We’re really shooting a mini-movie in eight days, and in that I’m doing two or three pages of dialogue with three or four different characters and, like, five hours of action sequences. That can be any day.”
Jessica Alba felt stereotyped for being Latina until ‘Dark Angel’
As hard as the show’s work schedule could be sometimes, Alba was very appreciative about the show for a number of reasons. Not only was it one of her breakthrough projects, but it came at a time when Alba was being pigeonholed into certain roles. Speaking with Radio Free, Alba once confided that her beginning in the business was full of unflattering offers.
“And it was such a classist, bizarre thing because I grew up in the United States,” Alba said. “My mother’s white, my father’s Mexican. And my father’s very dark and my mother’s very fair, and I came out how I did, and they always want to pigeonhole you. And it’s bizarre. We’re just people living in society, and I never think about it until people make me think about it.”
However, Cameron would offer Alba a role unlike anything she’d ever played. This started a domino effect that saw Alba star in other projects like Sin City and Fantastic Four that broke away from stereotypes.
“And this industry definitely made me think about me being a Latin girl, up until I was eighteen and I did Dark Angel, and [series creator James Cameron] basically said, ‘You’re the future of the race.’ And that’s basically what Dark Angel was, where you were just a mixture and we’re not going to talk about it. And it’s done, and then you’re just a human being going through the struggle of your journey. And so now, it’s very liberating working with people that aren’t going to pigeonhole you as the janitor’s daughter,” Alba said.
