Jessica Alba Once Shared Her Role in the Family Friendly ‘Fantastic Four’ Was Unintentionally ‘Sexy’
By playing Marvel superhero Sue Storm in the Fantastic Four, Jessica Alba saw her celebrity profile increase significantly. But she felt playing Sue had another side-effect when others saw her as sexy in the role.
Jessica Alba was worried about her ‘Fantastic Four’ role before doing the movie
At the time, Fantastic Four was one of the biggest roles of Jessica Alba’s career. It saw the actor stepping into a role of a prominent superhero, which was a daunting opportunity for her at first. But in the end, Alba couldn’t resist the temptation to do the movie.
“Honestly, I was worried,” she once said during a 2004 San Diego Comic Con (via Campus Circle). “But at the end of the day, when this opportunity came I couldn’t say no. I just feel I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I turned this movie down. It’s such a great story and hopefully everyone will be pleased.”
In a resurfaced interview with IGN, Alba explained that Sue Storm’s potential as a role-model excited her.
“I think she’s a wonderful role model for young women. I think she’s intelligent, she’s maternal, she keeps these boys in line,” Alba confided. “She has amazing power to have a force field which basically protects people. To me, as someone who is a maternal person and who wants to have kids – and who does have dogs who are very naughty and like to go into the middle of the street – it’s something that I would like to have; a force field to protect people.”
Jessica Alba’s ‘Fantastic Four’ role became unintentionally sexy
Alba’s sex symbol status at the time wasn’t something the actor was accustomed to. If only because she didn’t want the label defining her career.
“I sort of went through a life crisis,” she once told InStyle (via HuffPost). “I was like, ‘This isn’t what I set out to be. I’m so much more than this, but I don’t know how not to be a sex symbol.'”
For most of Alba’s earlier career, she didn’t do too many roles that were considered sexualized. But she might have unknowingly stepped into one when she played Sue Storm. Alba believed the unintended consequence of being in the Fantastic Four was it helped give her the sex symbol status she didn’t want.
“I was playing a superhero [Sue Storm in Fantastic Four] and all of a sudden when they put me in a superhero uniform they called it sexy,” she once said in an interview with GQ. “I was covered head to toe, but everything turns into sexy because I have a body. I was never, oh, I’m going to be a sexy superhero. I was just playing a superhero. The only overtly sexy role I’ve ever done was Sin City. In Into The Blue I was playing a girl who, with her boyfriend, scuba dives for gold. You don’t wear sweaters and leather pants when you’re scuba diving.”
Jessica Alba once shared she felt honored to play Sue Storm in ‘Fantastic Four’
Despite certain issues she had playing Sue Storm, she was grateful for the role. She looked back at her time in the film fondly for the same reason she originally chose to do the superhero movie.
“Our [Fantastic Four] made a lot of money and kids loved it,” Alba told MTV News. “And little boys and little girls look up to a female as a superhero. To be one of the first — if not the first — in this generation to do that, I was pretty honored.”
