Director Paul W.S. Anderson’s take on the Resident Evil video game franchise, which began with 2002’s Resident Evil, introduced a brand new character who went on to become the film franchise’s main heroine. I’m of course talking about the badass Alice Marcus, played by Milla Jovovich across six films in the $1.23 billion series.
But Jovovich wasn’t always the star of the show.
In an extensive oral history of the Resident Evil film series published on Inverse this week, Milla Jovovich revealed that though she was originally set to play the first film’s main character, the script was rewritten by Anderson in the wake of Michelle Rodriguez coming aboard. Long story short, Jovovich complained and ended up falling in love with Anderson.
Wait a second. Back up. Take it away, Milla!
“I almost quit the movie. I was shooting something else, and Paul had hired Michelle Rodriguez to play Rain,” Jovovich recalled. “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.”
She continued, “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.”
Jovovich and Anderson are now married with two kids.
