7 DEADLY SINS
Jessica Alba really wanted to be in the new movie “Sin City,” but she hesitated when she first looked at the cult-classic Frank Miller comic books it’s based on.
Her character, Nancy, is a stripper – and not just a topless one.
“She’s bottomless, too,” Alba tells The Post.
“I really couldn’t be bottomless for my dad. He would disown me.”
In the end, Alba kept on both parts. Co-directors Miller and Robert Rodriguez (“Spy Kids”) let her film the strip-dance scene in a cowgirl outfit that covered the naughty bits.
But Alba still looks stunning in “Sin City,” and the movie doesn’t skimp on beautiful women (or nudity).
Along with an all-star cast of guys, including Bruce Willis, Benecio Del Toro, Clive Owen and Mickey Rourke, the movie (opening Friday) features a drool-worthy harem of some of Hollywood’s most gorgeous young actresses.
That’s only right for this visual feast, which uses cutting-edge special effects to create a super-stylized film-noir world that looks almost exactly like the dramatic drawings in Miller’s cartoons.
Miller and Rodriguez planned each shot using panels from the books as a storyboard, and they didn’t compromise on Miller’s hyper-violent and sexy vision.
Their movie tells three interconnected tales about gritty characters in a dark, rainy and grim place called Basin City, where the dirtiest neighborhood, Old Town, is run by prostitutes – the Old Town Girls – who will machine-gun any john who gets out of line.
“They’re fantasies,” Miller tells The Post. “Sometimes they’re dark fantasies. Sometimes they’re alluring fantasies. Sometimes they’re both.”
Real-life women may never live up to the fierce and erotic women that Miller draws in his books, but the “Sin City” actresses came awfully close.
“I swooned over them all,” Miller recalls.
“Doing this movie was like falling in love again and again.”
JESSICA ALBA IS NAUGHTY AND NICE AS NANCY…
“I’m not someone who goes out clubbing and to raves,” Jessica Alba tells The Post. “I’m not really a dancer.”
But Robert Rodriguez wanted Alba to come up with her own exotic dance for “Sin City,” just like Salma Hayek did in his 1996 movie “From Dusk Till Dawn.”
“And that’s the sexiest woman’s dance ever put onscreen!” says Alba, 23, who plays the lovely but unattainable strip-club angel Nancy.
“Those are big shoes to fill.”
So Alba plunged into research, including several nights spent watching pros perform at strip clubs in L.A. and New York.
On the “Sin City” set in Austin, she learned how to twirl a lasso from real-life cowboys, and there were plenty of mishaps along the way.
“I was practicing on everybody,” she recalls. “Bruce Willis would walk by, and I’d say, ‘Wait, Bruce, can I lasso you? Just close your eyes and put your hands over your face.’
“I hit a lot of people in the head. I felt bad about it.”
In the end, Alba improvised the strip dance in front of a green screen, listening to CD of music she had brought in, “with everything from Emmylou Harris to Kylie Minogue.” (Rodriguez added different music for the final cut.)
Alba says she didn’t actually learn that much from the pro strippers she watched. “All they’re doing,” she says, “is trying to get tips.”
And she isn’t in a hurry to get back to one of their clubs.
“The only person it would be appropriate to go with is my boyfriend,” Alba says, referring to Cash Warren, the 25-year-old Yale grad she met last year on the set of this summer’s “Fantastic Four,” where he was an assistant to the director and she was playing the Invisible Woman.
“But I don’t want Cash looking at other people,” she says.
“I want him to think about me naked – not some woman he can throw money at.”
ALEXIS BLEDEL IS DECEPTIVE AS BECKY …
The final cut of “Sin City” is mostly black-and-white, with flashes of unnatural color added by computer: a pair of candy-apple-red shoes, a splash of bright-yellow blood. But Rodriguez and Miller actually shot in color, and they used it for a small handful of details in the final cut – most memorably, Bledel’s wide blue eyes.
But while the “Gilmore Girls” star (who’s dating her former on-screen boyfriend Milo Ventimiglia) looks innocent, her “Sin City” character Becky isn’t what she seems. In one gnarly scene, she enrages Dawson’s character so much that she seems to take a bite out of Bledel’s neck and spit the flesh on the floor.
“It didn’t hurt at all,” says Bledel, who was wearing a prosthetic skin piece, “but it looked disgusting.”
BRITTANY MURPHY IS SASSY AS SHELLE …
“Brittany isn’t afraid to go lower class,” Miller says of Murphy, who has the trailer-trash thing down, after eight years as the voice of beauty-school dropout Luanne Platter on “King of the Hill” and co-starring with Eminem in “8 Mile.”
That made her perfect for the sassy “Sin City” waitress Shellie, a brash broad who Murphy calls “a throwback to the ’30s or ’40s.”
In real life, Miller says, Murphy is a perfectionist who’s sometimes too nice for her own good.
“One time on the set, she was walking with her coffee and accidentally spilled it all over these cables,” Miller recalls. “She goes, ‘Get me a paper towel!’
“We had her ushered out, because the last thing we needed was an important actress playing with wet electrical cables.”
ROSARIO DAWSON IS ROUGH AS GAIL …
“I wanted a real New Yorker with a genuine edge,” Miller says of the character Gail, the leader of the kick-ass Old Town Girl prostitutes.
He found it with Dawson, who’s best known as Colin Farrell’s wife in “Alexander” but was discovered 10 years ago sitting on her Lower East Side stoop and cast in the notorious skate-punk movie 1995 “Kids.”
Dawson got the “Sin City” idea right away.
“It’s a tough town where a man punches a girl across the face, and she chops his [penis] off,” says Dawson, 25, who recently snagged the role of Mimi Marquez in the movie version of “Rent.”
“Rosario’s just cool no matter what she does,” Alba says.
That’s lucky, because in “Sin City,” she had to wear a barely-there outfit that even Miller calls “ridiculous” and a Mohawk that Rodriguez admits is “a very weird hairstyle.”
“The outfit was unbelievable,” Dawson says. “The costume designer gave me a bunch of flowers when I decided I was going to actually wear it.”
JAIME KING IS SWEET AS GOLDIE …
“I always wanted to be in a movie with Rosario,” says King, who has known Dawson for 10 years, since the days when King was a 16-year-old beauty from Omaha making big waves in New York fashion world with modeling gigs for Vogue, Mademoiselle and Allure.
The two hung out in the same cool-teens crowd – “mostly the guys who were in ‘Kids,'” King recalls – and reconnected on “Sin City,” in which King plays Goldie, a hooker with a heart of gold.
DEVON AOKI IS CUTTING AS MIHO …
She’s an heir to the Benihana steak-house fortune, so you’d think this New Yorker would know how handle knives. But when Aoki showed up on the “Sin City” set last year to play Miho, a hooker who slices up men with a samurai sword, it quickly became clear that she was clueless when it came to martial arts. “I made her my special project,” Miller recalls of the model, actress, Page Six fixture, and budding hip-hop star (who recently signed to record for a new company). “I got a couple of trainers to work with her and had her come in early and stay late every day. “Robert was laughing at me,” Miller says. “He called me Devon’s soccer dad, because I was so hard on her. But I was so proud when it worked.”
CARLA GUGINO IS NO-HOLDS-BARRED SEXY AS LUCILLE …
None of the “Sin City” actresses is more in-your-face sexy than the 33-year-old Gugino, who plays Lucille, “a fast-talking, deadpan dame,” as Gugino calls it, and does her first scene clad in nothing but “a G-string and strategically placed shadows.”
The nudity might come as a surprise to those who remember Gugino as the spunky mom from the “Spy Kids” movies.
But she doesn’t mind taking her clothes off.
“I’m more European in that way,” says Gugino, who tried the scene with a bra before the directors decided it actually looked less sleazy when she was naked.
Categories