  Jessica Alba, one of the many stars in the ensemble comedy Valentine's Day, opening Friday. |
LOS ANGELES — If there’s anything I’ve learned from watching hundreds of romantic comedies, it’s that beautiful women just can’t get a date. Do I have that right, Jessica Alba?
The observation makes her laugh. “I think a lot of romantic comedies show people super in love, with happy endings, and they don’t depict real life,” Alba says, sort of sidestepping the question.
Not so in the movie Valentine’s Day, which opens in theatres nationally on Friday.
The A-list-crowded romantic comedy from Garry Marshall is chock-filled with bad matches — starting from her own with Reed (Ashton Kutcher). The movie opens with her character, Morley, accepting his proposal in the morning and having second thoughts by noon.
Add guys who lie about being married, women who carry secret betrayals through a lifetime of marriage, strangers on a plane, gayness, straightness and some such as Kara (Jessica Biel, a.k.a. the “other Jessica” and a pal of Alba’s) who’ve basically just given up finding a guy, and romance becomes a complex thing.
“This movie shows you that everything isn’t always tied up in a perfect bow, and everything is complicated and life is complicated,” Alba says. “You kind of just have to be true to yourself.”
So... inquiring minds want to know, has Jessica Alba ever turned down a proposal of marriage? “No,” she says, then adds, “I mean, I think someone thought they were proposing. They had no idea. It’s just like ‘You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.’
“We weren’t together that long. When he said it, I was like, ‘Really?’”
In real life, Alba is married to producer Cash Warren, who was a crew member on The Fantastic Four (in which she played Sue Storm) when she shot it in Vancouver. She acknowledges they were friends “for about 10 days” before they became a couple. They have a 19-month-old daughter named Honor Marie.
Honor is central to Alba’s approach to work these days.
“I mean, I just frankly don’t care if the role’s small. I just like working with good directors. That’s sort of been my focus since I had my daughter.”
Indeed, in Valentine’s Day Alba shares the bill with Kutcher and Biel, plus Julia Roberts, Jennifer Garner, Jamie Foxx, Anne Hathaway, Patrick Dempsey, Taylor Swift, Taylor Lautner, Bradley Cooper, Queen Latifah, Topher Grace, Shirley MacLaine, Hector Elizondo and George Lopez.
“The shooting spanned over a two-and-a-half-month period, and I worked a couple of days here and there. I managed to shoot two other movies at the same time (Meet The Little Fockers with Ben Stiller, and Robert Rodriguez’s Machete) and still spend all kinds of time with her. You can easily miss milestones at that age, so it’s all about balancing my workload.”
In Meet The Little Fockers, she plays one of new dad Greg Focker’s workmates (you’ll recall he’s a nurse). “I play a pharmaceutical sales rep, and we have a lot of interaction in the movie... I don’t want to give away too much, but she’s hilarious and very eccentric.”
If you saw Quentin Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, you’ll recall Machete as one of the bonus movie trailers that aired between the two features (it was the one starring character Danny Trejo, with the slogan, “They just f----- with the wrong Mexican!”)
The trailer got such good response, Rodriguez decided to go ahead and make the movie.
“It’s really cool, and it was so fun,” Alba says. “I play identical twins. But the main character I play is an immigration officer, strait-laced and by the book. The other one is not evil, she’s just on the other side of the law and kind of a mess.
As for Trejo, one of the scariest-looking character actors in Hollywood, she says, “Danny is just the sweetest guy on the planet. He is adorable, absolutely adorable.”
Alba, whose first claim to fame was as the star of the TV series Dark Angel, still likes her action roles.
“I always played sports and was a tomboy growing up. And all my friends were guys until I was an adult.”
Which is not to say she’ll turn down the next romantic comedy that comes her way.
“I don’t think I’ve nailed myself down as an actress,” Alba says. “I think I have so much more to learn, and staying stimulated and challenged is my priority.”
jim.slotek@sunmedia.ca
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