Eva Green / Proxima
Eva Green is extraordinarily shy and reserved for an actress. As a student, she was terrified of raising her hand or ever standing in front of the class. That led her actress/mother Marlene Jobert to encourage her to take theatre classes as a means of overcoming her chronic timidity. Though she is still bashful, Green has unleashed her inner demons in daring and provocative performances in films such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers [2003] (her screen debut), Casino Royale [2006], and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For [2014]. She confesses that acting offers her an ideal outlet for her subconscious side.
“I wouldn’t call myself self-confident in real life,” Green says. “It’s always been a phantasy for me to play powerful women — with some cracks in their personality — because I am not like that.”
Her new film, PROXIMA, sees her deliver arguably the finest performance of her career as French astronaut Sarah Loreau who is a last-minute addition to a space mission aboard the international space station. Much of the story centres around the intensive training process she undergoes that forces her to leave her young daughter in the care of her ex-husband (Lars Eidinger). Further, her ISS duties will see her spend a year away from both earth and her child. A further complication comes in the form of her arrogant, condescending fellow astronaut, Mike (Matt Dillon), despite the evident sexual tension between them.
“I see astronauts as saints, they’re amazing,” Green says. “We’ve seen so many movies that glamourise space travel but we’ve never seen something that us about the actual day-to-day training that is very intense, physically gruelling, very emotional.”
“It was quite interesting for me to discover how masochistic the job can be and how wonderful the astronauts are. They go beyond their limits and endure all this pain but they embrace it because they know it’s for a greater good – the exploration of space…”