“I feel very calm here”: Eva Green on loving life in London
At Town & Country, we believe almost any photograph can be enhanced by the presence of a well-behaved horse, cheerful hound or other appealing creature. Eva Green is of a similarly animal-friendly mindset, and for our planned cover shoot, requests both cats and dogs to accompany her, inspired particularly by a white lurcher who featured in a previous fashion story.
Alas, the lockdown intervened before this delightful event could take place; but it is therefore not a surprise to me when the actress arrives for our interview accompanied by Winston, her miniature schnauzer.
“He’s my child,” she tells me, in her husky, French-accented tones, tickling Winston’s fluffy black chin as he snuggles on her lap. “I like little, bearded dogs. He’s two, and he’s a good boy and very sensitive. I cook for him more than I cook for myself. Venison, which is better than chicken, lots of vegetables, flaxseed oil, a bit of fish, beetroot… And then for me, I can’t be bothered, I’ll just have pasta. It’s ridiculous!”
We have met in Soutine, the chic St John’s Wood brasserie owned by Corbin & King, which, on this sunny, pre-quarantine morning, is packed with yummy mummies and their voluble offspring. Huddled into a corner of the room, clad in her trademark self-effacing black from head to toe, the delicately beautiful Green looks as if she would prefer to be hundreds of miles away.
And indeed, it turns out that this is the case. “I want to buy a farm,” she confides. “Maybe in Wales – I love Wales, or Ireland would be my absolute dream. So, yeah, I’m looking. And I’m taking agriculture courses online – I want to learn about permaculture. It’s very interesting, very ecological – they should teach it in school. I need to find a clever way to make money, because I don’t want to kill any pigs, or anything like that. I love pigs, they’re even more intelligent than dogs, though not as cute…” Her ambition is to live there self-sufficiently with several Irish wolfhounds; so would she give up acting to fulfil her fantasy? “You never know,” she says enigmatically.
Fans of cinema must hope that Green’s dream doesn’t come true for a while yet. As an actress, she has been consistently impressive ever since her screen debut in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers in 2003; she brought depth and pathos to the Bond girl with her portrayal of Vesper Lynd, James Bond’s nemesis in the 2006 film Casino Royale, and was mesmeric as Serafina Pekkala in The Golden Compass and as the trapeze artist Colette in Tim Burton’s bittersweet remake of Dumbo. It occurs to me that in every part, she embodies a certain reserve, an innate solitude. Green’s latest role, in Proxima, takes this solitary quality to its logical extreme. She plays Sarah, an astronaut training for a year-long mission to the International Space Station while trying to mitigate the damage this inflicts on her relationship with her eight-year-old daughter, Stella. As with her leading-lady performance in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Green seems to have an effortless rapport with the little girl portraying Stella (Zélie Boulant-Lemesle, making a brilliant debut), their moving, tender scenes bringing tears to the eyes – though she’s visibly embarrassed when I tell her this. “There was something raw about her, very shy, very internal, and we really connected on that level,” she says. “I’m always attracted to people who are not completely outgoing.” Would she like a child of her own, I wonder? “I don’t know,” she says. “For now, no. What will be, will be. It’s difficult – it’s the judgement of other people, really.”
The role took Green to the ends of the Earth (although she never actually left it), with filming taking place in Moscow’s Star City and in Kazakhstan. She was put through her paces as if training for the real thing, jogging for miles, lifting weights, wearing a Martian exoskeleton and, in one memorable scene, running horizontally on a machine designed to replicate the gravity conditions in space. “Oh, it was cool, I loved that! It’s completely surreal. On the Moon, you felt slower and lighter, and on Mars it was heavy… I had sessions with a Russian instructor, who was very harsh – I had to show him the protocols in Russian, and he would say, ‘I don’t care if you’re an actress! This is wrong, this is wrong!’ I mean, I’ve never been in a Soyuz before!” The whole experience left her in awe of the astronauts she encountered during filming, particularly the women, including Claudie
Haigneré, the first Frenchwoman in space, and the Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. “They’re like superheroes, these people. They speak five or six languages, they have to be good at everything physically, they sacrifice themselves. They’re almost like saints – it’s a religion, wanting to explore the unknown.
“Samantha Cristoforetti just gave birth, and she was like, ‘I can do better than men, I can work harder.’ The male astronauts will automatically show you pictures of their children and partners, but the women usually don’t, because it would distract them from the mission. They are so strong, it’s difficult to see the cracks in the armour.”
Green’s other forthcoming screen appearance, in the BBC’s lavish adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s novel The Luminaries, also required considerable travel, filmed as it was over several months in New Zealand. She plays the part of the brothel madam Lydia Wells – “a manipulative, very ambitious, power-hungry woman. You discover the gaps in the armour a bit later, which I like in characters.”
The travelling is, she says, the best part of her job. “Even when places are harsh, like Moscow or Kazakhstan, it’s good to see them.” By contrast, the fame and glamour attendant on her work seem to be distinct disadvantages for her. Seeing herself on screen, she says, “I want to projectile- vomit. I can’t watch.” And although naturally exquisite, with porcelain skin, large blue eyes and dusky locks, she dislikes having to scrub up in the requisite Hollywood manner. “My mother would tell you – I should know how to do my hair, to make an effort. I ought to wear more colours, to be more of a woman, but I like comfort too much. High heels just feel really anti-feminist to me, we’re like birds on stilts,” she says.
That’s not to say Green is immune to vanity; she is apprehensive about the prospect of turning 40 this summer, and what it may do to her job prospects. “Lots of women say, ‘I found myself, I feel much better than when I was 20.’ But I still want to be desired – not one woman wants to age. I’ve heard already that I’m too old for some roles, so I don’t want to be a liar, going, ‘Oh, it’s so great.’ Those people who say, ‘I like my wrinkles, it’s my inner beauty’ – no!” So would she consider surgery to hold back the years? “Oh, no. I saw a woman yesterday who had so much done, she looked like an alien. I think it’s an addiction.” She pauses to consider. “Maybe a tiny thing? But if the surgeon has had work done and looks weird, don’t do it!”
Acting is in Green’s blood: she is the daughter of the French-Algerian actress Marlène Jobert, who worked with Jean-Luc Godard and Louis Malle, and even her dentist father Walter has made the occasional film appearance. Born and brought up in Paris with her fraternal twin Joy, Green spent her teenage years haunting the cinema, “obsessed” by Bette Davis, Helena Bonham Carter, Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Adjani. “I used to go on my own, my sister wasn’t interested,” she says. (Joy, a business-school graduate, has two children and is married to an Italian count, with whom she runs a wine-making business near Pisa. “We became close with age – we were too different as children. Now we really get on; we are still very different, but we kind of complete each other.”) Around this period, Green dyed her blonde hair black, an act of rebellion against the strict French school system, she thinks, and never looked back. “I spent five hours at the hairdresser! It’s who I am, I feel more ‘me’.”
Eventually, despite her reluctance to follow in her mother’s footsteps, she bowed to the inevitable and went to drama school. “I really liked it, though I didn’t want to admit it to myself.” She studied at London’s Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, which she followed with a three-year drama course in Paris, and worked in French theatre before landing her role in The Dreamers.
Its success allowed her to move to London, where she has had a home for more than 15 years. She has since become one of those elegant Anglo-Gallic chameleons, like Kristin Scott Thomas and Charlotte Rampling, whose nationality has become blurred and who are beloved on both sides of the Channel. Green herself says she is more at home in the UK. “I feel very calm here. I’ve got a British driving licence, which is a miracle. I’d like to get a passport. When you’re born somewhere, you’re spoilt and you don’t see the beauty of it. In London, there’s more space and parks and nature.”
And until she finds her coveted farm, that will have to do…
‘Proxima’ will be released later this year. ‘The Luminaries’ is coming soon to the BBC.
