"Desperate to Seem 16"

"Desperate to Seem 16"
New York Times Magazine
09.05.99
By Lynn Hirschberg
[This article has been edited to include only information about Jessica Alba. The entire article can be found at the New York Times Magazine's website.]

For the entertainment industry, the money is in teen-agers. For aspiring actresses, and actors too, making it in Hollywood means making it right now — before you look 20.

Four days later, after the evening at Dublin's, Shane breaks up with his girlfriend. "I was losing my focus," he explains over the phone. "I could tell it was only a matter of time before the topic of marriage would be raised, and I felt like right now I needed to be single." He pauses, then asks: "Do you know Jessica Alba? She's a very cute girl. I helped her pick up her car once. We were hanging around this apartment building, and she needed help with her car. Last week, somebody promised to give her my phone number. Do you know her? Could you tell her hello?"

Jessica Alba, who is 18, will star as Max, a genetically enhanced teen-ager, in "Dark Angel," a TV drama by James Cameron and Charles Eglee set in the year 2020
and scheduled as a midseason replacement show sometime early next year. The "Dark Angel" story line: As a small child, Max escaped from a research facility, and now the government is trying to find her as she searches for her past. "The character is the surrogate for the adolescent audience," says Eglee, who won an Emmy for "N.Y.P.D. Blue" and is the executive producer of "Dark Angel." "Max feels a little like a Frankenstein, but how many kids that age don't feel like a Frankenstein?"

This is Cameron's first project since the enormous success of "Titanic" and his first TV show ever. He and Eglee saw 1,000 girls for the part of Max before they chose Jessica Alba. They originally wanted a black girl, but Jessica's ethnic-mix beauty knocked them out. "And she could really act," Eglee says. "You can get caught up in the magic of these incredible creatures coming in, but they have to be able to act. There was tremendous pressure during casting. We'd be done with the auditions, and the casting agents would say, 'If you want this girl, you have to make a deal right away.' That's when I realized this teen thing had really gone crazy."

Jessica, who has been acting steadily since she was 12, said at first she didn't want to do a TV show. She has skin the color of coffee with cream and beautiful almond eyes. She is sitting on the patio of the restaurant Orso, eating pizza for lunch. She is wearing jeans and a rose-colored, intricately wrinkled Issey Miyake top. After co-starring last year in the teen-movie hit "Never Been Kissed," she got several offers but was wary of getting stuck in the teen-age genre. "They were calling me for everything," she says, and then adds diplomatically: "I'm so lucky that the teens are in demand. But I don't really want to be part of that. People blow up, and you're so overexposed, and then what do you do? I am young, and I don't need to compromise. So I didn't work for eight months, which is the longest I've ever gone. I just had the faith that I was waiting for something really great."

During her time off, Jessica and her best friend, who is also named Jessica, Jessica Moe, would hang out together. On New Year's Eve, they went to a party thrown by Courtney Love and Drew Barrymore. The Jessicas are a study in counterpoint: Alba is dark and exotic; Moe, who is 16, is blond and blue-eyed. (Moe wants to be an actress too. She recently landed a car commercial, which means she can get her Screen Actors Guild card.) At the New Year's party, the Jessicas began dancing together. Both girls still live with their parents in a suburb 45 minutes outside of L.A., so they are not really in the scene. "Here were these beautiful girls dancing together," says an agent at C.A.A. who saw them that night. "They cleared the floor. It was every man's fantasy."

The story went around that Jim Cameron heard about the dancing and said, "Get me that girl." Jessica doesn't think so. "I think I heard that the casting agent told my agent that we were dancing together," says Jessica, sounding amused. ("Oh, yes," says Jane Berliner, Alba's agent at C.A.A. "Whenever they dance, the calls pour in.") "But I don't think our dancing had anything to do with 'Dark Angel."'

Since its premise is original, "Dark Angel" has an opportunity to push, at least a little, the boundaries of the genre. "That's why I did it," Jessica explains. "And also I think it won't just appeal to girls."

"What are you saying?" says Jessica Moe, who has just come back from getting her cousin's car washed. Moe has pinned up her blond hair with butterfly barrettes and is wearing sky-blue corduroy jeans and a cropped pink T-shirt that shows off her belly.

"Have you eaten?" Jessica asks, offering Moe some pizza. Then, to me, she says: "I have to train with Jim Cameron's trainer five days a week for 'Dark Angel,' and we work out together. Moe watches my back." Jessica pauses. "Did you talk to your agent?" she asks.

Moe nods, looking a bit dejected.

"Your agent doesn't send you out on anything," Jessica says. "She's rude. The trouble is, you just don't look 17."

Moe laughs. "Yeah," she says, "older guys are always asking me, 'How old are you?"'

Jessica laughs. "Your problem is you look 25," she says. "What are you going to do? The girl's got boobs and you can't escape them." The girls crack up.

"But it'll happen," Jessica says reassuringly. Moe nods and gets ready to leave the restaurant. "You just have to be seen. Once they see you, it'll be all over."

Jessica Alba could have gone to the wrap party for Shane West's movie, "I'll Be You," but she didn't want to go. "I'd go to say hello to Shane, but I know what that party's going to be like," says Jessica, who is with Jessica Moe at one of their favorite places, a Middle Eastern restaurant that has a belly dancer on the weekends. They were invited to the Playboy party and the "American Pie" premiere, but in the last month they have gone to only one Hollywood event, a small birthday party for Jessica Alba's agent. "I've seen a lot," says Jessica, sounding much older than 18. "And I think, Do you want to be hyped for three seconds, or is it about the work? It's really hard when success comes fast, but I've been to those premieres, and they're only interested in you if you're somebody. Now they tell me, 'You'll be the next big thing.' I don't pay attention. I don't. I can't." She pauses. "If I'm going to be in this forever, I don't need to blow up right now."

And yet she is going to be on the cover of Details, and magazines ranging from Teen People to GQ to Vanity Fair are calling her manager with interview requests. "It's embarrassing," Jessica says. "I'm just trying to do great work. I talk to actors my age, and they are all writing a script or comparing themselves to Brando, and I want to say: 'You're a 20-year-old ex-model. Shut your face!"' Moe laughs. She listens hard to Jessica, whose years of experience have made her wary. Both girls study acting at the Atlantic Theater Company, a school founded by David Mamet and the actor William H. Macy. Two summers ago, Jessica went by herself to a six-week intensive acting program run by Atlantic Theater in Vermont. "It was an eye opener," she says. "Out here, everyone just wants you to be natural, natural, natural. There's no emphasis on training. But only a very few actors are naturals. You have to study. It's not enough to be cute."

There is a happy ending. Or at least, true to the genre, the ending ispredictable. Shane West is busy shooting his TV show. "In this episode," he says, calling from the car, "I defend my sister and blow up at my father." Through a third party, he has invited Jessica Alba to a barbecue at a mutual friend's house, but she wasn't sure she and Moe would go. They're still training as many as five days a week, and they've been hanging out with members of the U.C.L.A. football team. "They're rad guys," Jessica says. Moe is looking for a new agent. "She's too beautiful not to get seen," says Jessica. "It's only a matter of when."