Actor Jessica Alba’s journey to motherhood was a life-changing experience. It not only affected her personal life, but her career as well. The veteran star believed the challenges she faced as a mother helped form her role in the Spy Kids franchise.
How ‘Spy Kids’ director Robert Rodriguez came up with Jessica Alba’s character
Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez was the mastermind behind the Spy Kids movies, having conceptualized and directed the first one in 2001. Since then, he’s directed and written every Spy Kids feature in the blockbuster franchise, including the 2011 sequel All the Time in the World. Alba would play the retired spy Marissa in Rodriguez’s fourth Spy Kids movie, who was also a mother to a couple of kids. Alba believed Rodriguez came up with the idea for Marissa after visiting her shortly after she gave birth.
“When I had my first child, the director and writer [of] Robert Rodriguez, who’s a friend of mine, came over to my house, and I was like, ‘Gosh, I don’t know how I’m going to go back to work, and what if I just want to be a full-time mom, and what if I’m not good at it?’ I had all these anxieties and doubts. And he reminded me to stay true to myself,” Alba once said in an interview with Today’s Parent.
Rodriguez gave her some much-needed work-life balance advice that she believed, in hindsight, became the genesis for Spy Kids.
“He said, ‘You don’t have to work as much as you were before, but you still have to hang on to your own identity and your daughter will respect you for that. And if it’s part of who you are, you have to be true to that,’” Alba recalled. And I was like, ‘Gosh, you’re right.’ And he said, ‘You’ll figure out the balance. It’ll be hard at first but you’ll figure it out.’ And that was kind of what inspired him to write this character. She’s a full-time spy, gets pregnant and decides to give up her job and become a full-time mom, but she’s not very good at it.”
Since then, Alba and her ex-husband Cash Warren have become the parents to two more kids.
Alba’s profession wasn’t quite like her Spy Kids counterpart, who was responsible for saving the world. However, the Fantastic Four star definitely could relate to her character’s experiences as a working mother. In fact, there were quite a few mother-child scenes in the movie that hit very close to home.
“She ends up not having a sitter and having to save the world — and she has to bring the baby with her . And I think we’ve all had moments when we’ve had to bring the kids to work, and we’re like, ‘Don’t cry! Don’t have a meltdown.’ You’re trying to keep them as calm as possible and on their best behavior, but they’re kids, and they’re going to be kids,” she said.
Rodriguez, who worked with Alba before in Sin City, had five children of his own. Because of his experiences,, he was able to help Alba fit into her roles as a mother both in real life and in Spy Kids.
“Yeah, I definitely brought a lot of my experience of being a new mom with a baby to work every day, for sure,” she once said in an interview with Collider. “I talked to Robert a lot about it. He’s a father of five, so he has tons of experience with children. I would ask him questions about parenting like, ‘What do you do when you’re out and your kid has an explosion, and you don’t have anything with you?’ Or ‘What do you do when you have to work, but you’re so tired, and you just want to spend time with them? How do you balance it?’ So, I think a lot of these themes and things we talked about probably inspired some of the circumstances that my character was in.”
