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A couple of weeks ago, we had some of the first excerpts from Jessica Alba’s December cover interview with Elle Magazine. The interview was especially notable because Alba said some particularly dumb things, even for her. The one quote that made me laugh (and cry) was “Good actors never use the script unless it’s amazing writing. All the good actors I’ve worked with, they all say whatever they want to say.” Right. Ugh. Anyway, long story short, I never remembered to check to see if there were any more interesting quotes from the piece, and then I got my new Elle yesterday. The whole Alba piece is a mere two pages, nearly half of which is made up of random quotes from Alba’s costars talking about how great she is (eye roll). But! There are a few more “bitch, please” parts I wanted to pull, including Alba’s decision to throw her “first-time directors” under the bus for her series of bombs.

Jessica throws her directors under the bus: Jessica Alba’s previous forays into funny have never been quite as promising. There was 2007’s utterly flat Good Luck Chuck, in which Alba played a penguin researcher opposite Dane Cook (ha?), and 2008’s The Love Guru, a Mike Myers send-up about spirituality and hockey—two chronically foreign concepts that don’t really play to the passions of America’s moviegoing masses. Of course, Alba’s too savvy to trash any big names, and perhaps too kind to go overboard in assigning blame. She takes accountability where she needs to. “I know I haven’t been swimming in the deep end with some of the movies I’ve done,” she says. “I wasn’t trying to. I knew what they were.” Alba does, however, offer one clinical reason as to why these movies bombed. She whispers it: “First-time directors.”

Her low point was when her director told her she was ugly when she cried: “I wanted to stop acting,” Alba says. “I hated it. I really hated it.” Actually, it was the lack of acting she hated. “I remember when I was dying in Silver Surfer,” she says, referring to the 2007 Fantastic Four sequel in which she plays a woman who alternates between being invisible and wearing a spandex catsuit. “The director was like, ‘It looks too real. It looks too painful. Can you be prettier when you cry? Cry pretty, Jessica.’ He was like, ‘Don’t do that thing with your face. Just make it flat. We can CGI the tears in.’ And I’m like, But there’s no connection to a human being. And then it all got me thinking: Am I not good enough? Are my instincts and my emotions not good enough? Do people hate them so much that they don’t want me to be a person? Am I not allowed to be a person in my work? And so I just said, ‘F-ck it. I don’t care about this business anymore.’”

After she became a mother, she started choosing directors who she couldn‘t throw under the bus: “The time I’m not spending with my kid has to be worth it,” she says, moving her brown Wayfarers toward her boxy Burberry bag, “so when I sat down with my agents after I was ready to go back to work, I told them: It’s all about the directors.” Alba wasn’t dead set on being a leading lady anymore either. She’d pursue roles based on quality of experience rather than quantity of screen time. “Now I prefer I’m not the lead,” she says nonchalantly, pleased with the maturity of the revelation. “It’s a totally different approach—way better.”

On how she probably would have refused to work with Robert Rodriguez and Robert DeNiro earlier in her career because she didn’t want to be typecast as Hispanic: [The role in Machete] is exactly the kind of part Alba would have chafed at earlier in her career, worrying about being typecast forever. “I feel like I have nothing to lose now,” she says. “If the part looks fun and I get to work with great people—De Niro was in this one too; I’ve done two movies with Robert De Niro this year!—I’m going to take it. Machete was hilarious. I made no money doing it; it was just a project to do with my friend [Rodriguez], who, by the way, allowed me to have a lot of input on my character.”

[From Elle]

My God, this chick is so stuck up her ass. And she’s dumb too – really, powerfully stupid. So… not only is she disrespecting screenwriters in this interview (and she really did offend people), but she’s also throwing many of her directors under the bus for her history of lousy performances. At some point, directors and writers and yes, even her costars, are going to collectively turn to Jessica and say “You know what, moron? It’s you. It’s not us. The world is not conspiring against you to make you look like a griping, unprofessional idiot who can’t act her way out of a paper bag. You’re doing that all on your own.”

Elle Magazine photos and scans courtesy of Jessica Alba’s fansite.

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