Milla Jovovich Almost Quit ‘Resident Evil’ Because of Michelle Rodriguez

Milla Jovovich has spent the vast majority of her career playing Alice, the heroine of the Resident Evil franchise. She’s starred in six movies that have made her an action icon and beloved to fans of the video game adaptation. However, according to a recent interview with the blog Inverse, she almost quit the movie when Michelle Rodriguez was cast.

Milla Jovovich & Michelle Rodriguez during <em>Resident Evil</em> premiere in 2002. (Photo: Getty)
Milla Jovovich & Michelle Rodriguez during Resident Evil premiere in 2002. (Photo: Getty)

Jovovich was cast to be the star, but things began to change when a second actress was cast. As she told Inverse, “I almost quit the movie. I was shooting something else, and Paul [the director] had hired Michelle Rodriguez to play Rain. … 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.”

After reading the revised script, Jovovich demanded a sit-down chat with the director, Paul W.S. Anderson. They talked for three hours, and she has a vivid memory of that encounter. She said, “[Paul] 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.”

Despite the drama at the beginning, Jovovich decided to stick with the film. And she even got an unintended bonus from the project: Jovovich and Anderson began dating during the production of the first film. Fifteen years later, they’re still together and have two kids.

As for her and Rodriguez, they’ve been pals since the beginning.

Michelle Rodriguez and Milla Jovovich speak at Comic-Con in 2012. (Photo: Getty)
Michelle Rodriguez and Milla Jovovich speak at Comic-Con in 2012. (Photo: Getty)

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