Michael Weatherly collaborated with ex-girlfriend Jessica Alba for the hit series Dark Angel. But during a screen test, the director immediately called out the pair on their performance.
Michael Weatherly auditioned with Jessica Alba for James Cameron’s ‘Dark Angel’
Weatherly described his audition for the sci-fi series Dark Angel as a pretty nerve-racking experience. He portrayed cyberjournalist Logan Cale on the hit series, which he asserted was very different from other roles he’d been courted for. According to SciFi and TV Talk, Weatherly underwent a heavy audition process to leave no doubt he was right for the show.
“I remember arriving at James Cameron’s production building in Santa Monica for my first audition. As you walk towards the front door you immediately become aware that this is a man who has made a few billion dollars working in the entertainment industry,” Weatherly recalled. “Right away I began to feel nervous. My initial reading was with the show’s producers. Next time it was with Jessica Alba and the producers. At my third and final audition, the only ones there were Jessica, Jim, Charles ‘Chic’ Eglee [co-creator/executive producer] and myself. Chic was sitting in a dimly lit corner of the room, stroking his skull and watching the proceedings like Dr. No in those old James Bond movies.”
Despite being anxious about the situation, Weatherly still couldn’t help notice Alba’s presence when they met.
“By the time I’d gotten to that meeting I was pretty terrified,” Weatherly said. “I’d only met Jessica the one time before, but it was on that day I realized what a shockingly self-confident young woman she is. No shrinking violet here! When you walk into the room and look at Jessica you think, ‘She’s an attractive girl,’ but there are a lot of attractive girls in Los Angeles. I believe the reason Jessica was ultimately cast as Max is because she has, among other things, this core fearlessness in her. She’ll stare at you as if to say, ‘OK, show me what you’ve got.’”
The two would hit it off in the series well, portraying a believable and exciting relationship. But this was partially due to James Cameron’s own perfectionism. The Dark Angel creator wasn’t shy about letting Weatherly and Alba know when they weren’t meeting expectations.
“When I was screen testing for Dark Angel, there were a lot of pheromones flying—a musky scent in the room—and it was a long scene, like five pages. And it was just me, Jessica Alba, James Cameron and the writer. So we do this intense, throbbing scene. And we get to the end, and I’m like inches away from Jessica and we’re looking at each other and Jim goes, ‘And we cut. To a cat food commercial. That was terrible. Let’s try it again.’ And I’m like, ‘Really? You didn’t feel that? That felt incredible,'” Weatherly once said according to NCIS Fanatic. “That’s one of the things that happens in acting: If you think it’s really good, it’s probably really bad. And if you think it’s really bad, it’s probably OK. And if you think it’s OK, it’s either great or it sucks.”
Why Jessica Alba and Michael Weatherly later broke up
Weatherly and Alba seemed to develop chemistry behind the scenes as well. The two would eventually engage in a real-life relationship, to the point where Alba would get engaged to Weatherly. But the relationship between the pair didn’t last.
“It just didn’t work out. I was so young, 18, when I started dating him. I was a virgin. I knew I wanted to be in love with the first person I slept with, because for almost everyone I knew, the first experience made them feel like s***. So I wanted to be really careful that he was going to be in love with me and wasn’t just going to leave me,” Alba once told Cosmopolitan.
She added that the relationship completely put her off dating other actors in the business.
“It’s really, really, really difficult to have the same occupation as the person you’re with – especially when you’re both actors. Actors are pulled in so many different directions that unless you both are absolutely into it through thick and thin and completely sure about each other, it’s just hard. I’ve decided I’ll never date an actor again,” she said.
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