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Jessica AlbaActress “Adults are not always right.” Her outsider status started with her mixed heritage. Her dad, who was in the U.S. Air Force, is Mexican, and her mom is white. When she was growing up in Mississippi, Texas, and California, Jessica said that people often thought her mother was her babysitter. “When you’re not racially defined, they don’t accept you in either culture,” she explains. But Jessica was also rejected by kids her own age, she thinks, because she was unwilling to follow the crowd. Neither smoking at lunch nor being a teacher’s pet really interested her. Occasionally when kids picked on Jessica, her father would go to school in an effort to intimidate the bullies. But it didn’t help. “I cried a lot. I didn’t smile very often,” she says of those years in sixth and seventh grade.
Two apparently contradictory paths helped her escape. From age thirteen to sixteen she became a born-again Christian. It gave her a sense of belonging and was her own way of rebelling against parents who were very cool and very liberal. “Some people need extreme forms of guidance to deal with life. It kept me out of trouble. Instead of going to parties and messing around, I was trying to bring people to the light,” she says, looking back. The other outlet was acting. Its biggest appeal, initially, was that it released Jessica from the daily misery of school. She spoke three lines in her first part, a role in a 1994 movie, Camp Nowhere, a gig that was supposed to last for only two weeks. Instead she worked for two months after an actress in the project dropped out. When she got her Screen Actors Guild card, it was the first time she felt accepted. It’s also when she realized there might be an alternate route for her. Her dad made her go back to school, but Jessica continued to audition for more jobs so she could stay out of the torture chamber. Before long, she was making enough money to hire a California-certified tutor. “I worked my ass off. I think that was the beginning of me taking my life into my own hands,” she says. Some of Jessica’s best-known roles have been in the television series Dark Angel and Flipper, as well as in films such as Sin City, Fantastic Four, Into the Blue, and Good Luck Chuck. Although she is only twenty-six, she has already spent thirteen years building her career and advocates an early start for any girl. “If I could say anything to teenage girls it would be, ‘You’re not alone. You’re not crazy. There is nothing holding you back,’” she says with conviction. “I wasn’t given anything on a silver platter and now I get to reach out to young women who feel excluded.” In this letter, she writes to herself at the beginning of sixth grade, after two self-righteous PTA moms and the principal of her school called her to the nurse’s office to accuse her of being a slut.
Dear Jessica, They think I’m a slut??? I’ve never even had a boyfriend!!! This is only the latest injustice. Kids pull your backpack off as you walk down the hall. They’ve kicked dirt in your food outside during lunch. And, as you see now, adults are no better. They’re all ignorant. The kids think something is wrong with you because you’re developing early. The teachers don’t encourage their students to think or question anything. They want textbook answers. And parents, especially the rich parents of white, soccer-playing kids, are the worst. They constantly criticize you and tear you apart. All of this makes you think maybe you’re crazy. You’re so different, so impatient and so resentful of authority. Maybe that’s wrong. But you’re not crazy, Jessica. Adults are not always right. Whatever you do, do not spend one second worrying about what kids your own age think. They are worthless right now. One more thing. Boys are awful. They are made of nothing but hormones until they’re about twenty or twenty-one. So, you just can’t take relationships too seriously until you’re older. You’re going to change; what you want in life is going to change, and your taste is going to become more sophisticated. It’s fun to have a crush, but don’t think it’s forever. You have the rest of your life to do that. And use birth control and condoms, please. Keep questioning and challenging, |
JESSICA ALBA may have a body that is foremost on the minds of adolescent boys and men who peruse E!’s Sexiest Celebrity Bodies list or Maxim magazine’s Hot 100 roll. But girls—and what’s on their minds—are whom the young actress actually cares about. “Because I felt so alone when I was a kid, I really love young women. I think they are incredibly underestimated,” she says. 