With silver-screen beauty and a bold spirit, EVA GREEN is a very modern heroine. PAUL FLYNN meets the actress as she models fashion’s contemporary classics.
Eva Green hates interviews. She tells me as much within five seconds of our meeting at Le Monceau, a discreet, liveried restaurant in the 8th arrondissement of Paris.
“It’s very pretentious,” the 33-year-old French actress says of talking about herself, removing her sunglasses to reveal those piercing eyes and cut-glass cheekbones. “The work should speak for itself, but I know it doesn’t work like that.”
It is 9am on a Monday morning, breakfast time. Green orders just a glass of water and brushes off a question about what she is wearing by pointing to a concertina-pleat jacket bearing the logo ‘Armani’. The immediate impression is of a tough nut to crack but, as it turns out, she is quite the reverse. Charming, funny, sweet and contentious, she is actually rather good at the thing she hates.
Green’s interview aversion began early, just after her breakout film The Dreamers was released, ten years ago now. “Don’t, that’s scary!” she protests. “I looked at some reviews and it was so terrible, people criticizing my body, my boobs. I was traumatized. How come people are so mean?”
The film, directed by screen legend Bernardo Bertolucci, is a retelling of the ’68 student riots in Paris through the story of a semi-
incestuous love triangle. On the back of astonishing performances, it turned Green and Michael Pitt into precocious young stars in their early 20s, and her memories of Bertolucci as a director are nothing less than pleasurable. “We filmed it not very far from here and yet it feels so far away now. It was my first chance. It was an amazing experience on every level; ideal, no pressure. Bertolucci, the actors, so much fun...”
The only problematic director Green has ever encountered was one she didn’t even get to work with, after she turned down a part in Lars von Trier’s 2009 film Antichrist, on account of the Danish auteur’s extreme working methods. “After The Dreamers, I think people would have been very nasty to me if I [did Antichrist],” she says. “People always talk about the sex. You have a sex scene and they’re like, ‘Oh my god, there’s sex.’ So I’ve decided not to have a sex scene for a while, because you feel like it’s the only thing people remember. I feel very vulnerable.”
Von Trier was vocal in his disappointment at Green turning down the role. “Lars von Trier was my God. I loved everything that he’d done, it was my dream and fantasy to work with him, but I didn’t want to do certain things. I was asking questions and not being a puppet. There were a lot of sexual things where I was like, ‘Really? I’m not sure; is there another way to make it work?’ and he was like, ‘Nobody questions my authority.’ Brutal.”
After The Dreamers, Green went on to produce an impressive work portfolio that is split between commercial fare – reaching its apex with her role as dark-hearted Bond girl Vesper Lynd opposite Daniel Craig in 2006’s Casino Royale – and the independent films she seems more personally attracted to. I venture that her recent appearance in this year’s gladiatorial sequel 300: Rise of an Empire fell into the former category. “You could say that,” she acquiesces. “As actors, we sometimes have to make political choices and it’s helpful to do both. It’s good to do the big machine films because they will be seen by so many people, and then do little things to satisfy the heart.”
One bonus of shooting Rise of an Empire for five months in Bulgaria was the intense workout program that went with the role, or as Green puts it, “the ability to get fit for free”. “The trainer took pictures before and after. It was amazing. I had bingo wings before,” she says. “It makes you more confident. When you stop [working out] after shooting, it’s hard not to have somebody kicking your *** every day. You want it. It’s like being an animal. I kind of love it. Rather than too much thinking.”
Green admits that living too much in her head has been a problem in the past. She is currently reading a book about finding her ‘inner wolf’, while listening to existential American band The National (“So good”). Is the search working? She nods.
A natural beauty with a hint of darkness and an arresting red-carpet presence was never going to be far from fashion’s radar. But though she’s fronted campaigns for Montblanc and Dior, Green isn’t comfortable as a model. “I find it difficult,” she says. “You don’t have a character, but you are supposed to be sexy or strong. I’m so different from the characters I play that I feel like I’m made of glass if I put myself forward. ‘Here you go, here it is, here I am.’ No. I need my makeup.”
She has a similar approach to dressing for events. “I don’t like looking like myself. People say you should look more natural, wear no makeup, [but] it kind of puts protection around me to [do the opposite]. I like it a bit dramatic.”
Going into character, she says, is her safe place. “I don’t go back home after work like ‘don’t talk to me, I’m in character’ or any of that, but it helps me to know myself. It’s almost in your subconscious. You always relate [your role] to yourself. You are your own instrument. It’s like you have all those lives inside you. We are all different people. It’s kind of a mad job, actually.”
Her next foray into the madness of acting has led her to television and Penny Dreadful, a gothic horror series produced by Sam Mendes. Green calls it her most controversial part yet. Her character Vanessa Ives, she says, is “very complicated”. From Green, you expect nothing less. “[The show] is about outcasts, people who don’t really fit into society,” she explains. “They’re not normal. There’s a Doctor Frankenstein in it, a Dorian Gray in it. My character is this rebellious woman in Victorian times. She is her own woman. She’s very strong but has demons inside her, figuratively and literally. She has to try and tame them and deal with them and it makes her very special. She’s always at war with them, in conflict.”
As she talks, Green plays with the big, bold rings on her fingers. “She’s from Moscow,” she says, pointing at a deep-purple stone set in gold. “I’ve got other weird rings but she’s amazing. I have no idea what the stone is. I bought about ten rings when I was in Saint Petersburg for a shoot. I could kill people with one or two of them,” she smiles. Maybe she is a tough nut after all.
Penny Dreadful is airing now.
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