The 41-year-old actress recalls getting upset after Rodriguez's character was given better action scenes.
What would Resident Evil be without its star, Milla Jovovich?
In 2002, the 41-year-old actress starred in the film franchise's first installment that followed a special military unit that fights a powerful supercomputer and flesh-eating creatures after a laboratory accident. But before production even began, Jovovich says she almost quit the movie once Michelle Rodriguez joined the cast and Jovovich's character was rewritten with fewer action scenes.
"I almost quit the movie," Jovovich reveals in an interview with Inverse.com. "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."
After reading the new script, Jovovich says she was "livid" and decided to call the director to talk about the changes.
"I didn’t get the new draft until I was leaving to go to Germany from Canada, where I was working," Jovovich recalls. "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 a big talk, or I’m going to be on a flight tomorrow morning.'"
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According to Jovovich, she and Anderson discussed the changes 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?'" she says. "I pointed out every time I felt like my great scenes were taken away. That was how we started our relationship."
Anderson and Jovovich began dating during the production of Resident Evil and tied the knot in 2009. The couple share two daughters together, 9-year-old Ever and 2 year-old Dashiel.
Since the 2002 film, she has starred in five Resident Evil sequels made from 2004 to 2016. For more on Jovovich and her work on the post-apocalyptic movies, watch below.