Jessica Marie Alba (born April 28, 1981 in Pomona, California) is an American actor of Mexican and Danish descent.
Alba started her acting career as a teenager in the 1990s, playing in a few independent films, making a few appearances on The Secret World of Alex Mack, and doing a couple seasons of the revived Flipper series. Her lead role in Dark Angel (which she won by being picked by James Cameron from over 1000 candidates) made for her breakthrough, and she would go on to achieve worldwide recognition with various film roles throughout the 2000s — including the title role of Honey, a stripper in Sin City, and Invisible Woman in the Fantastic Four Duology.
Many of these roles featured Alba playing a Ms. Fanservice type to some extent, which helped cement her status as one of the most attractive celebrities of her day to many fans and magazines alike. However, she has publicly commented that when she was starting out in her career, she preferred not to use her sex appeal to get advantages and had fears of being typecast in "whore" parts. She also made it a point to have a personal code about never appearing in the nude, which she upholds to this day.
In 2008, Alba married Cash Warren, with whom she has two daughters, Honor and Haven, and a son, Hayes. In recent years, she's devoted more time to motherhood than acting, starting a retail brand called The Honest Company (specializing in non-toxic household products) and authoring The Honest Life, a book about this lifestyle. The company became highly successful, and Alba's net worth is estimated to be $340 million
. She stepped down from her role at the company in 2024.
She has accounts on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.
Despite looking entirely different and both having been in Valentine's Day (albeit never in the same scene), she is occasionally confused with Jessica Biel.
Selected filmography:
- Camp Nowhere (1994) as Gail
- Venus Rising (1995) as Young Eve
- PUNKS (1999) as Samantha Swoboda
- Never Been Kissed (1999) as Kirsten
- Idle Hands (1999) as Molly
- Paranoid (2000) as Chloe
- The Sleeping Dictionary (2003) as Selima
- Honey (2003) as Honey Daniels
- Sin City (2005) as Nancy Callahan
- Fantastic Four (2005) as Susan Storm
- Into the Blue (2005) as Sam
- The Ten (2007) as Liz Anne Blazer
- Knocked Up (2007) as As Herself
- Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) as Susan Storm
- Good Luck Chuck (2007) as Cam Wexler
- Meet Bill (2007) as Lucy
- Awake (2007) as Sam Lockwood
- The Eye (2008) as Sydney Wells
- The Love Guru (2008) as Jane Bullard
- Valentine's Day (2010) as Morley Clarkson
- The Killer Inside Me (2010) as Joyce Lakeland
- An Invisible Sign (2010) as Mona Gray
- Machete (2010) as Sartana
- Little Fockers (2010) as Andi Garcia
- Spy Kids: All the Time in the World (2011) as Marissa Wilson
- ACOD (2013) as Michelle
- Escape from Planet Earth (2013) as Lena (voice)
- Machete Kills (2013) as Sartana (uncredited cameo)
- Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2013) as Nancy Callahan
- Stretch (2013) as Charlie
- Some Kind Of Beautiful (2014) as Kate
- Barely Lethal (2015) as Victoria Knox
- Entourage (2013) As Herself
- Baby Baby Baby (2015) as Susie
- The Veil (2016) as Maggie Price
- Dear Eleanor (2016) as Daisy
- Mechanic Resurrection (2016) as Gina
- El Camino Christmas (2017) as Beth Flowers
- Killers Anonymous (2019) as Jade
- The Secret World of Alex Mack (1994) as Jessica
- Flipper (1995 — 1997) as Maya Graham
- ABC Afterschool Special (1996) as Christy
- Chicago Hope (1996) as Florie Hernandez
- Brooklyn South (1998) as Melissa Hauer
- Beverly Hills, 90210 (1998) as Leanne
- Love Boat The Next Wave (1998) as Layla
- Dark Angel (2000 — 2002) as Max Guevara / X5-452
- MA Dtv (2003) as Jessica Simpson
- Rock Me Baby (2004) As Herself
- Entourage (2004) As Herself
- Trippin (2005) As Herself
- The Office (US) (2009) as Sophie
- Project Runway (2010) as Herself (guest judge)
- Comedy Bang! Bang! (2013) as Herself
- The Spoils of Babylon (2014) as Dixie Mellonworth
- RuPaul's Drag Race (2015) as Herself (guest judge)
- Planet Of The Apps (2017) as Herself
- No Activity (2018) as The Actress
- L.A.'s Finest (2019) as Nancy McKenna
- StoryBots: Answer Time (2023) as Ms Pizza Delivery Lady
Tropes associated with her work include:
- Awesome, Dear Boy: She starred in the Fantastic Four films and Dark Angel because she wanted to play a superhero.
- Creator Backlash:
- You don't like the second season of Dark Angel? She doesn't, either, judging by her bashing it in the commentary for the season one finale.
- She had some issues with the scripts for the Fantastic Four films, especially when Sue strips off. Naturally, it made Sue equally distressed.
- Dyeing for Your Art: She dyed her hair blonde for the first Fantastic Four (2005) film, but wore a wig for the second. She also wore blue contact lenses.
- Fake Nationality: She's half-English, half-Malaysian in The Sleeping Dictionary.
- Follow the Leader: While she's certainly not the first Hollywood celebrity to launch a lifestyle brand, The Honest Company's success targeting young mothers combined with her relatively young fame meant a lot of female actors began following suit by launching lifestyle websites.
- Fountain of Expies:
- After Honey became a hit, Alesia Glidewell, who sounds like Jessica's picked to voice Carmelita Fox for Sly 2: Band of Thieves. Fitting that Carmelita and Jessica are sexy women of Mexican ancestry and that both of them are born in 1981.
- In a SpongeBob SquarePants book, there's a fish named Jessica Albacore. Funny enough, she's a fan of the cartoon.
- Gasshole: She won the Nickelodeon Kid's Choice Awards for best burp, and boasted about her belching talents in an interview.
- Ms. Fanservice: Her personal code against nudity notwithstanding, directors can't seem to resist having at least one scantily-dressed/suggested-nude scene in any film she does, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. She was apparently nude in two movies, but The Sleeping Dictionary used body doubles and her Shower Scene in Machete involved digitally removed underwear.
- The Killer Inside Me goes in the other direction.
- Old Shame:
- In an interview with the British magazine Arena promoting Fantastic Four (2005), she bad-mouthed two of her pre-Dark Angel movies — Paranoid (2000) and The Sleeping Dictionary — and her performances in them.
- She stated that she thought Good Luck Chuck was borderline pornographic, The Killer Inside Me was gratuitously violent (she's stated she doesn't want her daughters to see it), and would admit much later that she hated working on the Fantastic Four Duology movies so much that she almost quit acting.
- Playing Against Type: An Invisible Sign - a rare non-fanservicey role for her as a mousy, withdrawn math teacher.
- Production Posse: She's now done five films with Robert Rodriguez.
- Romance on the Set:
- She was in a relationship with co-star Michael Weatherly during Dark Angel; they were even engaged for a while, but they ultimately ended the relationship in 2003. She heavily hinted in later interviews through the years that she lost her virginity to him.
- She met her future husband Cash Warren while filming Fantastic Four.
- Star-Derailing Role: The Love Guru dealt a fatal blow to her already declining big-screen career, not helped by the lukewarm responses to Machete and Spy Kids: All the Time in the World. Sin City: A Dame to Kill For later bombing at the box office was the last nail on her major movie career. In 2019, she returned to series on televisionnote in the Bad Boys (1995) spinoff L.A.'s Finest, playing Nancy McKenna (the partner of the sequel's Syd Burnett). Fortunately, her billion-dollar household goods company was taking off around this time, giving her an estimated net worth around $300 million, so don't worry — she's doing just fine.
- Star-Making Role: Fantastic Four (2005) and Sin City consolidated her in film after Dark Angel had brought her to a lot of people's attention on TV (
especially the male variety).
