Word: alba
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Crashed out on a pile of purple cushions in her trailer, the Woman of the Future does not look as though she could clean your clock. Yet as Max, the bioengineered heroine of Dark Angel, the dystopian sci-fi drama from Titanic's James Cameron, Jessica Alba sports skintight bodysuits and leather as, swaggering lean and feline (literally: Max has cat DNA), she dives through windows and KO's tough guys twice her size. Now, barefoot and swaddled in a massive black turtleneck and baggy jeans, it's as if she has been shrunk within her clothes...
Being superhuman, Alba says, can be a pain in the rear end. The other day, she hung for several hours from a building in a harness, sitting on two grips' heads between takes while the crew fiddled with the camera angles. She spent another marathon session hanging from a bar above the set, praying her hands didn't go numb before she dropped--"'catlike,' the director said"--into the frame. "'Then,' he said, 'You just glide over to the door.' I've never done this before! Dropping 6 ft. and not falling on my butt is an accomplishment...
...Actors, Alba among them, will always tell you it's about the craft. Being the character, living the memories, blah blah blah. Which is true--but let's not kid ourselves. Alba's role is a physical one, and not just because of the Matrix-y martial-arts scenes, for which she studied kung fu and gymnastics. In the Buffy age, you're no heroine if you're not a babe, and the curvy Alba, 19, was pegged as TV's next hot young thing a year before the show even debuted...
...there's also a thematic relevance to Alba's looks. With her wavy black hair and dulce de leche skin, she's as enigmatic racially as Max is genetically: she could be Latina, Filipina, light-skinned black or dark-skinned white. Alba, the daughter of Latino and European-American parents, says, "Max is mixed up [ethnically] just like most people in the U.S. There's no purely one race, especially here...
...season does have its innovations. James Cameron's sleek sci-fi thriller, Dark Angel (Fox, Tuesdays, 9 p.m., starts Oct. 3), introduces buzz magnet Jessica Alba. On NBC's endearingly oddball Ed (Sundays, 8 p.m., begins Oct. 8), a lawyer moves back to his hometown, buys a bowling alley and courts his high school crush. And teen-TV satire Grosse Pointe (The WB, Fridays, 8:30 p.m., bows Sept. 22) looks like nasty fun. Are sitcoms and dramas back? Well, at least until Survivor returns, with its clones, to vote them off the island...