Milla Jovovich: A Perfect Getaway

Milla Jovovich picks up an unlit cigarette with her left hand, grips a Bic lighter with her right, and levels an intense gaze at me. It takes me only a couple of seconds to volunteer “Go for it, don’t mind me.” She smiles out of the corner of her mouth and says “Thank you” as she lights up, and I start to get the impression that people don’t often say no to Milla. The aura of effortless authority she projects, combined with an ingratiating warmth and easy humor, seems more native to a diplomat or other well-traveled cosmopolitan (she started out as a globe-trotting model) than to a contemporary movie star, most of whom fidget incessantly and approach chatting with film writers as a grim necessity.

As we stretch our legs and begin to talk about the topic at hand – her new film, naturally – her thoughts continually drift to her twenty month-old daughter, Ever, who arrived after what was reportedly a dangerous, excruciating delivery that began on Halloween night ’07 and continued on for three agonizing days. When Milla exclaims at one point that Ever has grown “thirty pounds in twenty months!” she momentarily becomes so flushed and animated that it’s safe to conclude that her career is not at the forefront of her thoughts these days. Which is somewhat ironic, since the thirty-three year-old’s popularity is at an all-time peak. Next month she begins filming Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth installment of the zombie-splatter franchise that rests entirely on her thin shoulders and that continues to justify its big, effects-heavy budgets with box-office results.

For the last few years, Milla has balanced her Resident Evil success with roles in smaller, often obscure indies such as the 2006 revenge film .45, but that dynamic is now shifting as the broader creative community takes more notice of her. A starring role in a Paul Verhoeven epic set in Czarist Russia is currently being considered, and she will also appear in Stone, a psychological thriller co-starring Edward Norton and Robert De Niro. This week , she stars opposite Steve Zahn in A Perfect Getaway, a tropical whodunit dipped in the self-aware, genre-specific humor popularized in films like Scream. The story follows three couples vacationing in a remote corner of Hawaii, where dead bodies begin to turn up on the beach. As Milla tells it, one of the joys of this particular shoot was allowing others to break their backs doing stunt work while she happily played the “new mom” card and focused solely on her acting work and enjoying the scenery.