She’s blonding with her characters

Jessica Alba, best known as the star of television’s short-lived “Dark Angel” and the feature film “Honey” -- and a favorite of all those “hotlists” in the men’s magazines -- is as much veteran as ingenue.

Acting since she was 12, the 23-year-old has just wrapped a solid year on location for three films, all due out this year and all, oddly, requiring her to dye her brown hair blond.

The first, “Into the Blue,” due out July 15 from MGM, Mandalay Pictures took her to the Bahamas. The role in the action-adventure featured scuba diving, which she loves, and sharks, which terrify her, but she was looking forward to warmer climes after four years in Vancouver and New York. .

Unfortunately, when she got there, “it was winter and it was freezing,” she sighed over a cup of tea at a Melrose Avenue cafe. “But it looked really beautiful.”

Fortunately, the weather wasn’t the only reason she chose the film.

“I never get to play a lighter, sweeter character,” Alba said. “Honey was sweet, but she was urban and street, and Max [in ‘Dark Angel’] was definitely street and very militant and hard.” For her role as a shark expert, “I’m like nature girl, sweet and smart and very sensible.”

She got even sweeter with her next role in “Sin City,” due out from Dimension Films on April 1. The film is based almost exactly, frame by frame, on the graphic novels by Frank Miller, so director Robert Rodriguez (“Spy Kids,” “Desperado”) had Miller co-direct the film with him. The film takes place in a world of corruption, vice, greed and murder, but Alba plays Nancy, an angel of goodness, the one innocent in the big bad city.

The way Alba talks about Rodriguez, you’d think he was the innocent.

“I’ve obviously been around for a long time, and there are so many people who are just evil,” she said of her experiences in Hollywood. “Everyone’s fake, everyone’s manipulative, no one’s loyal, people are just mean. And he’s not. Fame doesn’t affect him in any way, shape or form. He loves his family, he loves his wife, and he loves what he does for a living. He doesn’t mistreat people. And that’s really cool.”

From blissful “Sin City,” Alba moved to Vancouver and a six-month shoot on “Fantastic Four,” due out from Fox on July 1. Based on the oldest and highest-selling Marvel comic book title, the movie is about four inadvertent superheroes.

Alba here plays another sensible, kind character -- perhaps this will be her new “type.” Susan Storm is an intelligent, maternal scientist whose superpower comes from her feelings of invisibility. “She always felt like people overlooked her because she was a woman and because she was conservative,” Alba explained.

Her frustration ultimately becomes her power, giving her the ability to become invisible when she loses her temper.

Alba can relate to her character’s frustrations.

An Air Force brat, she was born in Pomona, but the family moved every few years. “I hated it, and I cried all the time,” she said of the upheaval. “I went to 12 different schools. I never was properly socialized.”

That’s why she decided to pursue acting at such a young age, “because someone else was making choices for me that I didn’t like, and I wanted to have control.” She’s quick to add that her family was very loving. It wasn’t their fault; she was just an unhappy kid.

That all changed when she walked onto her first set, on the film “Camp Nowhere.” “I finally felt that everything made sense, that this is where I belonged,” Alba said. She’s been working ever since.

Now that her year of back-to-back-to-back filming is over, Alba has time for a breather and a new career move. She has acquired a script called “Sonic” for which she is attached as executive producer as well as star. Alba was inspired by watching Drew Barrymore star in and produce “Never Been Kissed.”

“She’s a really proactive, lovely, good actress-producer,” Alba said of Barrymore, who’s also had great success producing and starring in the “Charlie’s Angels” movies.

Alba already comes across like a seasoned pro when discussing her own project.

“I want it to come in under budget, I want it to be really good, and I want my crew to be really happy at the end of the day. It sounds precocious coming from somebody who’s 23, I’m aware of that,” she said, but she’s excited to be able to prove herself. Sounds like another sensible role.