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"Dark Destiny" By: Anthony C Ferrante Like many young actors today, 18-year old Jessica Alba has bypassed the whole high school experience in favor of living it in the movies. With roles in this past spring's Idle Hands (playing girlfriend to a guy whose hand has a mind of its own) and Never Been Kissed (as part of a three-part clique of popular school princesses) Alba has definitely had her fill. She has now attended two big dances, as well as having blood splattered on her and being tied to the top of a car. But it's all in a day's work for the spunky young actress. "Working on those films really did feel like high school," says Alba. "I got to hang out and be cool, so it was good." Idle Hands was fun for Alba because its characters are not your garden-variety teens: Devon Sawa, who plays lead character Anton, for instance kills his parents and his best friends when his hand becomes possessed by the devil. "By no means should the people in that film be looked up to as examples," Alba notes. "I think they're going to look up to our characters, something's wrong in the home. It's really obvious how off-the-wall and what anti-heroes we all are. We are very cartoonish in that sense." While Anton engages in all sorts of unsavory acts, and the best buds he's killed come back as the undead, Alba is proud of the fact that her character is the only one who "doesn't have any of that weird stuff going on. She's very centered in what she is," the actress says. "She's groovy and cool and rides a motorcycle. It was sort of like Sigourney Weaver when i got to do all that crazy stuff with the ropes [and the giant fan]. I actually got to pretend i was tough for 3 seconds." She'll soon be playing a lot more often: Alba, whose highest profile gig prior to this springs one-two movie punch was the new Flipper television series, has just been pegged by James Cameron to star in his premiere foray into network television Dark Angel, for Fox. Co-written and to be executive-produced by the self-proclaimed "king of the world," Dark Angel will feature Alba as a genetically enhanced girl who has "really special DNA and ran away from this government facility with a bunch of other kids when she was little." "The government is after her and looking for her," Alba explains. She doesn't have a social security number, she doesn't have a given name and she doesn't have any family. She has some friends, but she can't be total friends with them because they might find out her secret." The story picks up in the 21st-century San Francisco, with Alba's character Max a thief by night and a bike messenger by day. "At this time in the future, the government really controls everything. Normal, civil people don't have any say in anything," says Alba. "My character is a cat burglar so she can get money to find her other siblings and have some sort of base or connection, because she feels so far away from everyone. In the process she falls into the arms of this guy who is in the underground too. He gets the dirt on the government, gets it out and tells people what is really going on. Both of us run from the government together and serve as the voice of the people." With a start date this month, Alba reveals that Fox's game plan is to air the show in the year 2000 as a midseason replacement, as part of what their calling "the future of TV." If it's successful Alba realizes that she could be committed to the series for the long haul. "I would be honored to be in a show that would keep going for five or six years," she says. "I would feel blessed that I could be a part of something like that, especially with James Cameron, because he is such a genius." Unlike many teen actors, however, Alba does have one advantage: She prefers the outdoors, and isn't completely caught up in the business. She's confident that if her career suddenly fell by the wayside, she could pick up and move on. "I've thought of college and maybe taking a correspondence course and doing it at home," reveals the actress, who just completed the thriller Paranoia in advance of her Dark Angel work. "I'll be working for a while, hopefully, and if I don't, I'll just try to do this as long as I can. If the business doesn't want me in it anymore, I"ll go back to school. I'm open to whatever the future holds." transcribed by: s3xnyou |