LOS ANGELES—“I’m definitely going to be married,” actress Jessica Alba, who is due to give birth to her baby with Cash Warren in June, said in a recent press conference. “You’ll find out when it gets leaked to the press.”
The recent Oscar presenter denied rumors that she is following an apparent trend among Hollywood moms-to-be: that she is going to have twins. She described Cash, who was an assistant director in her film “Fantastic Four” when they met, as a “fiancé on the way to being a husband.” There are reports that Jessica favors getting married in a civil ceremony and then having a low-key party for family and friends.
Asked if Cash is actively involved in preparing for the baby’s arrival and if he will assist her in labor and giving birth, Jessica quipped, “He’ll do whatever I say. That’s what all men do.”
Cash, 29, is the son of actor Michael Warren, a college basketball star who played with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) team. Cash co-produced “Made in America,” a documentary on gangs in South Central LA that debuted to good reviews at last January’s Sundance Film Festival.
Multilingual
Asked if she and Cash will raise their child to be multilingual, the actress, who has Mexican heritage, answered, “Yes. And my fiancé speaks French. I’m trying to learn Spanish. It’s just that every time I get into classes, I end up having work. So this is the perfect time. While I’m off, I can learn.” Jessica clarified that Cash’s mom (Jenny Palacios) is an American who lives in France.
The star of the horror thriller, “The Eye,” enthused about becoming a mommy: “I’m excited. I’m going to love my child to the most that I possibly can. I have a different perspective on things now. Things that used to be so important, like my work, aren’t as much anymore. Now, it’s family.”
Still, when a reporter asked for her plans, Jessica replied, “As a mother, I hope I learn from my mistakes and try the best that I can. As an actress, I’m definitely looking for material that’s a bit more independent, more character driven. Not so much driven by commercial and box-office prospects. Now that I have established myself, I can do stuff that’s more creatively fulfilling.”
She stressed, “Career is great but life is about your family and love. That’s much more important than something that can be taken away from you, like if you have 10 movies that bomb in a row. Then you have no more career. But you will always have your child.”
Pregnant pause
After having a string of movies shown one after another, Jessica said this was the perfect time to enjoy a pregnant pause — literally. “I feel very blessed to be in this business and be successful,” she stated. “I’ve been working consistently since I started. Now, I can take time off until I get that fire, that script and that role that will force me to work every day and give a hundred percent effort. In the meantime, I’m going to stop working. I’ll breathe for a change.”
The change includes the prospect of moving into a new house. “I led a life that didn’t include a child,” she explained. “So I’m changing my lifestyle to include a family. Everything has to change, from the car to the house.” She volunteered that she is enjoying preparing a nursery.
It was refreshing to hear the actress, who constantly topped the hottest babe polls in men’s magazines, talk about impending motherhood topics. As in: “I plan to breast-feed. I’ve had a few of these pregnancy nightmares. Last night, it was about stretch marks. I got up at three o’clock in the morning and I rubbed anti-stretch marks cream on my belly. Cash was like, ‘What are you doing?’”
But Jessica, who is reportedly still keeping a regular gym workout, reiterated her priority at this point: “Whatever my body is going to do, I just want my baby to be healthy. I’m going to give my child as much love as possible. That’s really my priority.”
HK film remake
In “The Eye,” a remake of the Hong Kong film “Jian Gui,” Jessica plays a blind concert violinist who receives an eye transplant that forces her to see frightening images. “I looked for quite a few years for the right horror movie to do,” she explained. “When I was 5, I snuck behind my parents’ couch and watched ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ with them. Since then, I didn’t sleep in my bed peacefully until I was 14 or 15. For about 10 years, that movie stayed with me.
“There are tons of different ways you can go about making films in this genre,” she continued. “There’s the gory and exploitative way — you know, body mutilation and things like that. I wanted something elegant but still terrifying and complicated. The fact that my character is blind, has a corneal transplant and is a classical violinist — that’s a great setup for a horror movie.”
“I’m definitely more appreciative of the sense of sight now,” Jessica said. “My eyesight was impaired while we shot a lot of the scenes in the movie because I had to wear ‘blurry’ contact lenses. When you don’t have your sight, simple things like washing your hands or getting a glass of water becomes a complicated, disorienting thing.”
Role research
She shared her experience of being with an extraordinary singer who is blind as part of her research for the role: “I learned not to judge or put limitations on people who have certain handicaps, not to think that they’re not as capable as anyone else. I hung out with this blind woman for about two weeks. She’s a trained singer. She’s in a master’s program at Boston University. She speaks three languages. She travels to Europe by herself. She showed me that it’s possible to do whatever you want to do. She auditions as a vocalist against people who are sighted. She was pretty inspiring.”
Filming on location in New Mexico was memorable to Jessica. “We were shooting in Albuquerque which, as you know, is quite spiritual,” she shared. “There’s a lot of mysticism going on there. I was living on a hill where they said a woman visits you at three o’clock in the morning while you’re sleeping. I had bad dreams pretty much the whole shoot because I was waiting for that lady to appear in my room. When you’re doing a movie like this, those things stay with you because you’re in a different mind frame.”
As for portraying a violinist, Jessica laughed as she admitted, “I definitely cannot play the violin like a classically trained musician. But I did play the notes while filming but they sounded really, really bad. I’m grateful to the real musician who played over my playing to make the notes sound beautiful.”
Toward the end of the interview, talk shifted back to her coming baby — is it a boy or a girl? Breaking into her winsome smile, Jessica said, “We are almost sure about the baby’s sex but I am not telling.”
E-mail the columnist at rvnepales_5585@yahoo.com and read his blog, “The Nepales Report,” on http://blogs.inquirer.net/nepalesreport.
