The Timeless Yet Underappreciated Allure of Eva Green

It’s 2006. Casino Royale.

For Eva Green, Vesper Lynd was the part that would cement her status as a name on the rise, but her acting career had begun just three years prior. With The Dreamers, in 2003, Green starred opposite fellow French actor Louis Garrel as artistically inclined siblings who become entwined with an American exchange student, played by Michael Pitt. The film was helmed by controversial director Bernardo Bertolucci, and in Kingdom of Heaven, a role she accepted only a week before production.

When it came to potentially playing a Bond girl, however, Green had reservations; she turned down the role when it was first extended to her, but reportedly came around to the idea after she had an opportunity to read the script and saw that the character was being written with more complexity than a mere sexual object. Now, 15 years later, it’s almost impossible to envision anyone else bringing the alluring and guarded character from Ian Fleming’s original novels to life on-screen. Vesper is the first woman James Bond truly develops romantic feelings for, and, st simultaneously, she is the one most easily poised to completely destroy any chance he has at finding love again. This potential is realized after her cutting betrayal and subsequent death. Green won several awards for her portrayal, and it was arguably this role that catapulted her into recognition. It seemed that, in spite of Green’s initial fears that she would be typecast post-Bond, only the sky was the limit when it came to future projects.

However, Green’s career since has largely consisted of smaller, independent films interspersed with the occasional big-name property. She has led movies like the simmering psychological thriller Cracks (which was directed by Ridley Scott’s daughter Jordan) and sci-fi drama Womb, enjoyed a short-lived stint in the role of Morgan le Fay on Starz’s Arthurian-set series Camelot, and was the first actress to inhabit the role of the witch Serafina Pekkala in the film adaptation of Philip Pullman’s Penny Dreadful would allow Green the chance to demonstrate the full scope of her acting abilities, as she stepped into the Victorian-era show to inhabit the powerful medium and clairvoyant known as Vanessa Ives.

Penny Dreadful ran for a total of three seasons on Showtime, and Green was inarguably its lodestar, despite sharing the screen with other acting luminaries such as Timothy Dalton, Helen McCrory, Patti LuPone, Rory Kinnear and Harry Treadaway. Her breakout television role neatly intersected with the path of another actor’s return to the small screen, Josh Hartnett, and amidst such supernatural threats as witches, undead creations and ancient vampires, the chemistry between Hartnett’s Ethan Chandler, himself a secret werewolf, and Green’s Vanessa made up for a significant part of what kept audiences tuning back in every single week right up until the show was unexpectedly concluded on June 19, 2016. Vanessa Ives is a tragic figure from the start, a woman whose power has made her both desirable to evil forces and the product of scorn, not to mention a target for those who believe a woman should not be able to possess that much capability. Watching the series now, it’s difficult to fathom an end result in which there is any happiness for her, but that makes Green’s performance all the more captivating, as well as all the more heartbreaking.

As hypnotic as Green is on screen, and in spite of the seemingly effortless gravitas she brings to any fictional part she occupies, her biggest and most consistent struggle is finding the next project that is worthy of her talents. Understandably, she has made attempts to avoid being pigeonholed into any one type of character, but since the conclusion of Penny Dreadful, most of her filmography has not quite replicated the conditions that made her such a dynamic presence on that series. Recently, she was cast in another Starz TV show, a miniseries adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s novel The Luminaries, and while her depiction of Lydia Wells, another role steeped in mysticism, has garnered her positive reviews, the common critique appears to be that she simply does not appear enough — which, in fairness, could be said about most of her post-Penny Dreadful work. 

Green is hands down one of the greatest screen presences of our time, and more people should be familiar with her filmography. Looking to the future, the hope is that she’ll be given a role that isn’t merely another quirky witch or femme fatale or ing cast or in a project that is quietly released direct-to-video. Her wealth of talent means that she should have her pick of anything she wants. Perhaps with the announcement dropping earlier this month that she’s been cast as Milady in a big-budget movie adaptation of The Three Musketeers (reuniting her with her Dreamers co-star Garrel), she’s already taking the steps she needs to cement her growing legacy as an actress.

Do you have a favorite Eva Green role? What would you like to see the actress do next? Let us know in the comments below.