JESSICA ALBA
She gives us her crash course in success
“The way women were treated… I was over it”
I’ m perched on a tiny stool in Jessica Alba’s enormous marble bathroom, singing, “Old MacDonald had a farm… E-I-E-I-O”
while the Hollywood star washes her toddler son’s hair in the bathtub. Her two eldest children, daughters Honor, 11, and Haven, seven, are dressed in matching silk pyjamas, and Alba, 38, tells them they can sleep in her bed tonight, since her husband (their dad, producer Cash Warren) is away. But on one condition, she says: “I’m not sleeping in the middle!”
The bathroom shelves are lined with products from The Honest Company – the successful wellness brand Alba founded in 2012 – and I wonder if this is an elaborate ploy to convince me she’s a regular, hands-on working mum. Fair play if so, because she hasn’t stopped since we began shooting eight hours ago.
When I arrived at Alba’s Beverly Hills mansion, it felt more like entering a Line Of Duty crime scene than a cover shoot, as I pulled on a pair of blue disposable shoe covers. She has a strict no-shoes policy in her house, so the entire 18-strong crew is wearing them, not to mention half a dozen members of Alba’s entourage – assistants, childminders, publicists – swarming around the open-plan lounge tapping at their iPhones.
Things are running behind schedule, so I’m hastily introduced to Alba as she fires commands across the room to the children over the cacophony of cartoons blasting from the huge TV. “Can you watch [the baby]? Can you turn it down? Can you take his elephant, please? Say, ‘Yes, Mom!’” It’s clear who the boss is around here.
Alba was the Hollywood actor who appeared in as many “sexiest women” lists as she did Hollywood blockbusters (including the Sin
City and Fantastic Four franchises). But it’s been seven years since she “did a Gwyneth” and launched her $1.7 billion wellness business, a line of non-toxic baby, household and beauty products, inspired by her own history of childhood illness. And now? Brand Alba is booming.
“I think a lot of people thought it was a conspiracy theory, like, ‘Oh, that thing is poisoning you,’ but it really was,” Alba says, referring to our new collective wokeness surrounding what we use and put in our bodies. “They’ve banned a lot of stuff because it is harmful, even in small doses.” I’m about to ask how it feels to be integral to a conversation that’s shaking up the beauty industry, but before I can, she’s whisked off for more photos.
The next time we meet is in Alba’s dressing room, which is bigger than my entire apartment and lined wall to wall with sky-high Louboutins and Manolo Blahniks, like dazzling relics of her red-carpet days. Without intending to quit the industry that made her a star, the success of The Honest Company provided Alba with the fulfilment that acting never did. “I was demeaned so much,” she admits. “The way women were treated in many circumstances, I was just over it. I’d do a lot of press; the guys did nothing compared to what I was doing. I was like, ‘I’m done doing it this way.’”
Hollywood’s murkiest corners have recently come under stark scrutiny, and I wondered if Alba ever experienced it at its worst. “I’m just gonna… say nothing, because I don’t really feel like focusing on that. Just know that I’ve been through it and I guess I learned how to have a really thick skin. I think that’s why I was so aggressive and such a tomboy and probably cursed too much. I’ve always approached everything with a bit of cynicism and a chip on my shoulder. Not in a bad way; in a way that drove me.”
This is a woman who speaks with a learned self-awareness of the power of her personal brand. “100% yes,” she nods. “I was always very thoughtful about my life choices,
you know? Even when I was going to clubs in my early twenties, [I made sure] I never got papped. Ever. I didn’t want people to think I was partying. I was very aware of how people who went out were perceived.” It’s a far cry from the wholesome image I had preconceived and I admire her honesty – and her stealthy ability to dodge the paps. “I was always with the bouncers; they knew how to take care of me. There were a few times I was not sober, stumbling into a car… no pictures!”
Alba admits to turning down a number of lucrative advertising campaigns that she felt were risqué and, instead, she was deliberately strategic. “I made a lot of decisions that were financially driven,” she shrugs. “I wasn’t competitive with other actresses, I was competitive with male actors. I was like, ‘Why can’t I be the star of an action series? Why can’t I open movies? Why can’t I put asses on seats?’ The more people get used to women starring in stuff, the easier it will get for us to be more equal.”
In a surprise move, Alba returned to US screens in the spring with LA’s Finest – a female spin-off of the ’90s
Bad Boys franchise – an action TV series that she did her own way, since she was an executive producer, along with co-star Gabrielle Union. “This is the role I always wanted,” she smiles. “I didn’t want to be the woman who Bruce Willis was into in Die Hard, I wanted to be Bruce Willis!”
When today’s shoot eventually wraps in the early evening, Alba high-fives the photographer and – kids finally in bed – we retreat to the lounge, where her assistant pours us both a glass of Cristal. Straight away, it’s back to business. “I love the brand architecture [of being a boss]; setting the vision and pushing outside the box, so people aren’t just clocking in and doing the bare minimum of what their job expectation is,” says Alba.
“I’m always thinking like an entrepreneur and I’m intuitive, so when someone’s just going through the motions and not thinking about the consumer’s experience, I challenge them. Most people want to do the least and expect the most. Not many people want to be exceptional. I’m not saying that in a messed-up way, that’s just a fact.”
Surely that’s not how any of her own employees (currently 200) behave? “You’d be surprised,” she shoots back. Has she ever had to fire anyone? “I never fire people. That’s not my job. It’s like the worst thing. I cry so easily. I would be a disaster.”
It’s extraordinary that Alba launched her company without any qualifications or business training, but I suspect that working solidly in Hollywood, from the age of 12 to 26, prepared her in other ways. Still, even she isn’t immune to the imposter syndrome that grips most of us from time to time. “I always sat back and let other people take credit for my work,” she admits. “For the first three years of the company, everyone thought it was my [male] business partner who came up with the ideas. I had to get comfortable with being undermined, with owning that I was smart. That was hard for me and I had to overcome a lot of social anxieties. My husband was always like, ‘You don’t need to go to college to be smart.’ But I felt like he [her business partner] got a different level of respect when he walked in the room.”
I can’t imagine the formidable businesswoman sitting before me ever having social anxiety. “I’m an actress,” she adds, pointedly, “not because I think I’m so dope, but because I like to be somebody else. A lot of actresses think they’re super-dope,” she digresses with a laugh. “Most of them are like ,‘I’m a freaking star!’
“Is there any more champagne?” she asks her assistant. No, comes the reply, but there is tequila. It’s now 9pm and after a quick change into tight black trousers, boots and gold hoop earrings, Alba is ready to be chauffeured to a friend’s birthday dinner. Actress, mother, entrepreneur, boss, friend and a party girl to boot. “Why not a little cocktail on the way out?” announces Alba, taking her tequila to go… in an eco-friendly disposable cup, of course. ◆
“I wanted to be Bruce Willis in Die Hard!”