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….