Bodies, insecurites exposed on ‘Into the Blue’
Someday, when they’re old and they have wrinkles and things have begun to sag and bloat and atrophy, Jessica Alba and Paul Walker will be able to pull out the poster for “Into the Blue” as evidence of a bygone era when their abs alone could sell a movie.
“I don’t even see that stuff,” laughs Walker. “I was walking through the hallway and – half-joking, half-serious – I got off the elevator and the (poster) was right there and I turned it around.”
In their new film, he and Alba play plucky youngsters who live and work in the Bahamas soaking up rays, diving for treasure and battling with nefarious drug dealers for underwater supremacy.
“I’m quite critical of my own appearance, but I had to just think the way the character did … which is she doesn’t care,” Alba says.
“She’s not sitting there looking at her body, she’s just working and she lives in the Bahamas and if she didn’t wear a bikini, it would be weird. Unless she wore a one-piece. But young girls don’t wear one-pieces.
“At the end of the day, I just had to think that girls that have curves and aren’t the skinniest things in the world are gonna feel more comfortable seeing me as the main character than somebody else,” adds Alba. “So hopefully, if I could do anything positive with it, I had to just think that maybe I would help young girls with their body image, maybe.”
Walker says he he shaped his body to the demands of the character, eschewing the overbulked physique typical of Hollywood action heroes.
“I’ve been over 200 pounds before, I got up to 205 and I was (lifting) 305 pounds, I mean, I was really strong,” he says. “But the second I went to go surfing, I had no endurance. I couldn’t do it. My shoulders were so big I couldn’t get proper extension. Nothing was working right.
“When (director John Stockwell) told me that he wanted me to look like a surfer, like a real diver, I was like ‘OK, good. That means I don’t have to go to the gym.’ “
Alba had the added frustration of sharing scenes with the more outgoing Ashley Scott.
“She’s really comfortable with her body,” says Alba. “She would just throw on a bikini and walk around and meanwhile, every time the camera shut off, I was like covering up in a towel and hating my life and calling my mom.”
Scott, though, is having none of it.
“She’s got a great bod. That’s crazy,” Scott says of Alba. “Everybody’s got their thing. I’ve got my thing. She has hers. Everybody has their insecurities in certain areas of their bod.
“But that girl? Come on. She’s a knockout. She doesn’t have anything to worry about.”