It’s safe to say, that when we look back at the career of Milla Jovovich, “Resident Evil” will be a major part of her cinematic legacy. Say what you will about the video game genre, but nothing else has come close to $1.2 billion this series has generated worldwide. And standing at the center of it all has been Jovovich, whose turn as Alice, has been a key for its success. However, had things gone another way, “Resident Evil” may have been quite different, and perhaps never gotten off the ground.
In a lengthy piece at The Inverse about the history of the franchise, Jovovich reveals that she had to fight for lead role in “Resident Evil,” when Michelle Rodriguez, hot off “Girlfight,” was starting to take a more central part in the script for the first film. Here’s what she had to say:
I almost quit the movie. I was shooting something else, and [director] Paul [W.S. Anderson] had hired Michelle Rodriguez to play Rain. And she had just come off ‘Girlfight’ and there was Oscar buzz. She was very hot at that moment, and my hotness had sort of been already four years old by that point. So Paul rewrote the script for her. It pretty much made my character “the girl,” and Rain was “the guy.” She got all of my big action scenes, and she became like Alice. And then Alice became this tag-along.
I didn’t get the new draft until I was leaving to go to Germany from Canada, where I was working. I ended up reading the script on the plane, so by the time I landed in Berlin, I was livid. I got to the hotel and said, “We have to have to a big talk or I’m going to be on a flight tomorrow morning.”
So Paul ended up coming over that evening and we literally sat for three hours and went through the script, page by page. He was like, “What do you mean? This didn’t change that much?” So I was like, “OK, why don’t we start with page one?” I pointed out every time I felt like my great scenes were taken away. That was how we started our relationship.
Indeed, not only did Jovovich ensure she was the star, the movie kicked off the personal and professional relationship with Anderson that continues to this day. As for Rodriguez, you have to wonder about how she felt about those final changes to the script….
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This really contrasts the news about her being somewhat upset that the series is getting rebooted. It’s hard to be sympathetic when it basically paints her as an aging primadonna afraid of losing the spotlight.
If you got hired for a job, and then found out they demoted you to assistant between you agreeing to do it and your first day, you’d be upset as well.
Being (understandably) upset is one thing, throwing a tantrum/threatening to walk until she ensured that Rodriguez came away with the “small” role compared to that of her own is another. When coupled with the news of her feeling burnt by Hollywood wanting to reboot the franchise so soon after she’d finished with it, it’s just hard to see her as a sympathetic figure.
Not following. She wasn’t making sure Rodriguez had the “small” role, she was making sure she had the role she already agreed to do. They changed the role on her when she wasn’t looking. Not sure how anyone could fault someone for trying to walk away from that. Nor feeling vulnerable when a franchise she put significant time and energy into (in spite of the final product quality) is cast aside and restarted so arbitrarily.
Maybe I’ve read too far into her words in the Inverse article that it makes it seem like she had no problem marginalizing Rodriguez’s role, but that she mentions the fact that Rodriguez was hired at the time in her career when she had Oscar buzz surrounding her and that Jovovich’s own (general) buzz was years behind and then goes on to state that once she realized Rodriguez’s character had taken “all her big action scenes” she was angry/ready to walk until Anderson agreed to changes, it certainly doesn’t seem like it’s worth sympathizing over, whether or not she was reclaiming the role she was hired for.
The one thing the article does well is provide that slanted viewpoint. While it’s entirely possible (without obvious statements to the contrary) that Rodriguez didn’t care about the changes, it’s essentially the same situation. She was hired on and then her role was changed due to an angry co-star threatening to walk until the director personally heard them out.
they took her scenes away and gave them to another actress. I’d walk away too. I don’t get what you are reading at all. She didn’t lose a.role to Rodriguez. They changed the role they offered her. That is context not worth ignoring