Anyone remember that episode of “Friends” where Joey told Soap Opera digest he didn’t really need the writers and that he just came up with his own lines?
Actress Jessica Alba may want to check out that episode and see what happened to Matt LeBlanc’s character.
The actress, who has been in a series of big-screen flops, says that the failure of the films isn’t entirely her fault. And that she feels following a script is optional.
“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,” Alba tells Elle.
This, of course, endeared her to no one, least of all writers like John August, who fired back with “Following your logic, you’ve never been in a movie with both good actors and amazing writing. That may be true, but it might hurt the feelings of David Wain, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller.”
Alba went on to say that it was during her time working on “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer” that she began to think about giving up acting.
“I wanted to stop acting,” she said. “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 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–k it. I don’t care about this business anymore.'”
REALLY! I would have thought that “Camp Nowhere” or “P.U.N.K.S.” may have been the films that would have thrown up the quit acting red flags.
So, she considered quitting…for what, .0016 seconds? That’s an eternity to an androi……OH, gotcha….
Acting quit YOU.
How can she consider quiting something she never started?
She was fine in Dark Angel, but she’s done pretty much nothing worthwhile since then. She could have gone the Milla Jovovich route and taken control of her career, picked fun projects, occasional indie films, and have a good time of it. When you are completely committed to your career like that good stuff can happen. Alba has had a career that was hard to follow in comparison even if you started off liking her in Dark Angel.
I thought she was tougher than this. I think her having a baby and the change in her hormones changed her attitude. It happens.
There is nothing like good writing and direction to bring the best out of an actor. When Jessica was in Dark Angel, I loved her character, lines and “lines”; she was hot, tough, and fun. Not so much with her other weight choices since then; aspects of her have shown, through but she’s not hit that magic combination that made her popular in the first place.
Likewise, Sara Michelle Geller was absolutely perfect as Buffy (and will eternally occupy that throne), but few of her roles since then have made her what we grew to love about her excellent acting and strength.
So Jessica has the potential but just has been hamstrung with bad choices.
Nix the word “weight” from my last post. This is what you get when you write this while watching “The Biggest Loser Finale”. My bad.
Now that we have Megan Fox, we can do without Jessica
@Glenn – So you didn’t SMG in the Scooby Doo movies was the pinnacle of dramatic performance?
Why all the hate, some o’ yous?
She’s married and has a family. It’s not like she *needs* to work. If she’s been smart and letting her money work for her (instead of the other way around), then maybe she feels like she doesn’t need the “cry pretty” kind of b.s. that young actresses can be subject to. (And she was perfectly fine in “Dark Angel”. So we know that there’s an actress down in there somewhere.)
If she wants to–and can afford to–get off of the carousel, I’m happy for her.
For me, it’s not that I’m hating on her, it’s her seriously-in-need-of-an-adjustment attitude.
If all you want to do is phone in a performance in a movie that you think doesn’t require you to actually work to get a paycheck, embrace that.
Don’t diss the fans who supported you previously, and definitely don’t diss the writers by saying stupid crap like “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” without realizing that those good actors put in a lot of hard work over a long period of time to hone their ability to intuit more about those characters, and because of how well those characters and their stories were written in the first place.
The fact that she is completely ignorant about the potential in the relationship between good writer and good actor means she hasn’t a clue about the former, and has absolutely no reason to describe herself as the latter.
So I’m not hating on her, I’m hating on her arrogance. If it turns out to be genuine stupidity on her part, then I will retract my contempt and substitute it with pity and compassion, and hope that someone will help her find clue.
Maybe no one’s pushed her to work at acting since Dark Angel. I really liked that show, and wanted to see a third season. But I’m not crazy when I say that her acting chops have been put on a shelf somewhere. Hell, she did better in those old Flipper episodes than she did in FF2… and no one but her has an explanation for that.
Maybe she’s just not articulating what she wants to say very well. I think good writing is the foundation of any movie but I think also that a lot of directors let their actors work within that structure to help shape the material. So maybe she’s just talking about some bad experiences. Tim Story directed both F4 movies (He also directed “Taxi” w/Queen Latifah and “Barbershop”.) and I don’t think he’s a director that’s interested in getting good performances out of his actors as much as he is in making money for the studio. And they were both bad movies. When she works with a solid director though, I think she does good work. I haven’t seen “Machete” yet but I thought she was fine in “Sin City”. And I thought she was very good in Michael Winterbottom’s “The Killer Inside Me”. I think “Killer” pretty much went straight to DVD but it’s one of my favorite films of the year and I think part of the reason is because Winterbottom is one of those directors that knows how to coax the best performance out of his actors.
I have to admit to being a little prejudiced in Alba’s favor because she’s so pretty. But I don’t think she deserves all the criticism she gets.
PS: Flipper? Seriously?
I’m heading for YouTube. 🙂
Barry: Seriously. She was like 15 in whatever Flipper reboot that was, prior to Dark Angel. It’s truly amazing what you’ll let yourself watch on Saturday mornings when you’re a little too tired to sleep 🙂
And no, no director lets all of their actors not read the script and “say whatever they want”. Not unless they’re blowing off steam during a session of giggle fits, or shooting an outtake reel. They might allow the better ones some leeway, but that’s not as common as she might think. Hopefully she read the scripts before accepting the jobs? If not, that might be a hint as to what’s really going on.
This is sort of funny. It’s from an article at iVillage Entertainment.
http://www.ivillage.com/jessica-alba-good-actors-never-use-script/1-a-297095
“What was Jessica Alba thinking? Obviously, actors can’t just make up the script as they go along. Maybe she momentarily confused filmmaking with Jersey Shore? But seriously, this quote is so ill-informed that we have to think it was taken out of context. Maybe she was trying to express her admiration for actors who improvise? Making up dialogue is something that directors frequently allow actors to do in comedies, less frequently in other genres. But the bigger an actor is, the more likely a director will indulge their requests to change the script.
So, we think that’s what she meant. But that’s not what she said. Hmm, if only a good screenwriter had given her some dialogue for the interview…”