I’ll never understand Robert Rodriguez’s obsession with Jessica Alba. She shows up in nearly all of his recent movies but never seems to actually want to do any of the things he’s written for her to do in them. In Sin City she refused to be nude while playing a stripper and she now admits that she made Rodriguez change Machete for her too.
If you’ve seen Machete you know that the entire film is pretty much soaked in sex and random nudity. In the movie’s opening moments a woman literally pulls a cell phone out of her vagina. But Jessica Alba wasn’t on board with that and even though she has a semi-nude shower scene, she wasn’t actually nude while filming it, and they just CGI’d all the nudity in. That wasn’t the only change Rodriguez made to accommodate Alba. She tells Metro, “I read the script for Machete but there was a lot of sex stuff for my character and I’m really conservative. I’d say to him: ‘You know the scenes where this is happening? I just feel really uncomfortable doing that.’” The result is a movie in which Alba’s character has almost no sex stuff, in fact she’s just about the only person in the movie without any.
Machete makes up for Alba’s uptightness it with all the insanity going on around her, but you have to wonder what it might have been like if Rodriguez had cast someone more on board with his original vision, and simply done the entire thing his way.
