I don't know if I can publish this article here, it might be deleted due to copyright, but here it is.
Eva Green on coping with crippling anxiety: ‘I’m very shy… I wish I was a silent movie star’
Gavanndra Hodge25 APRIL 2020 • 5:00 AM
I meet the actor Eva Green on one of those strange, early March days when we are yet to truly understand the implications of coronavirus – when people still hug each other and say, ‘Whoops, sorry!’ afterwards. Which is exactly what Green and I do when she arrives at Clifton Nurseries, a chic garden centre and café near her north London flat. She’s dressed in a black woolly hat, huge black puffer jacket and sunglasses.
‘Let me show you something so scary,’ she says, showing me a passage on her phone from Dean Koontz’s 1981 thriller The Eyes of Darkness, which seems to predict the pandemic with eerie prescience, appropriate passages circled in red.
Meanwhile, Green’s mother, who lives in Paris and to whom she speaks daily, has been telling her not to shake hands with anyone, not even to leave the house. Yet here we are, sitting perilously close, ordering fresh mint tea, ready to talk about Green’s new film, Proxima, directed by César-winning French screenwriter and director Alice Winocour.
In the film, Green plays French astronaut Sarah, who is preparing to depart for a year-long mission. But despite the hi-tech robotics and presence of Matt Dillon, Proxima is not your average space movie; it is not concerned with distant galaxies or alien life forms. The film is about Earth and the things that tether us to it. Sarah is an astronaut, but she is also a single parent; her daughter Stella played by the excellent 10-year-old actor Zélie Boulant.
‘It is a love story between a mother and a daughter,’ says Green. ‘And these people who are going to the International Space Station, all the way to Mars, they will lose sight of the Earth. It is like a self-sacrifice, like a death.’
In preparation for the role, Green undertook an arduous fitness regime with a Russian instructor in Cologne. ‘He was so harsh, treating me like a real astronaut. In the end he was so rude and mean that it became funny.’ She also spent time at astronaut-training centres, like Star City in Kazakhstan. ‘That was my favourite thing. I felt like I had entered a sacred realm.’
The film is a departure in many ways for Green. In Proxima, she is make-up-free, dressed mostly in overalls, dealing with the struggles of a working mother. It is beautiful and solemn – and her performance has been described as a career-best.
Green is probably most famous, though, for her glamorous role as Vesper Lynd in the 2006 reboot of the James Bond franchise, Casino Royale, featuring Daniel Craig as 007. At first she didn’t want to audition for the part (in retrospect, she says she was being ‘pretentious’), but when she read the script, she changed her mind. ‘I thought it was a very strong role. But I didn’t like when they said “Bond girl”. I would say, “I am not a Bond Girl, I am a character.”’
She loved making the film, though: ‘The set was joyous. Barbara Broccoli is amazing, one of the best producers I have ever worked with. I wish they were all like her: passionate, kind, caring.’ Green admits that she has had less pleasant experiences on set. ‘Of course, a lot. It is hard; it is the anti-glamour.’
Eva Green was born and raised with her non-identical twin, Joy, in Paris. Her mother, Marlène Jobert, was a successful actor who gave up her career for her family, and her Swedish father, Walter, is a dentist. It was, Green says, a very ‘Parisian bourgeois’ upbringing. She attended drama school in Paris, followed by a 10-week acting course at Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. ‘It was very intense, in a good way. But because my English was not very good, when I had to do Shakespeare, it was very hard. Often I couldn’t even understand what the teachers were asking me to do,’ she says.
Back in Paris, Green won parts in a couple of plays, but had such a bleak time, getting stage fright and ‘having blanks’, that she considered giving up acting. It was, she says, the Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci who saved her. She was in her early 20s, when she heard about a Bertolucci audition. ‘I was obsessed with him, obsessed with Last Tango [in Paris]’, she says.
The audition was relaxed, and soon afterwards she was offered the lead role in The Dreamers, an adaptation of a Gilbert Adair novel – sexy and incestuous, and suffused with the riotous politics of Paris in 1968. ‘My mother told me not to do it,’ Green says. ‘She was afraid that I was too sensitive, that he [Bertolucci] was going to be quite violent with me,’ she says, referencing the fact that the actress Maria Schneider had found the making of Last Tango in Paris emotionally challenging. ‘And that it would destroy me for life. I was like, are you kidding? It was the chance of a lifetime.’
The film, which was released in 2003, was a critical success, but did more for Green than simply launching her career. ‘Bertolucci gave me faith in myself. He was like a little angel.’ After seeing her performance, Jobert agreed that she had made the right decision; but the rest of Green’s family found the film’s explicit intimacy shocking. ‘When you are not in the business and you see something so sexual, it is too brutal. I mean, it was horrific for me when I saw it. But I hate watching myself anyway.’
She hated the ancillary elements of being an actor, too, not least the red carpet. ‘I remember my first time. The Dreamers was about to come out. It was an Armani event, and [Martin] Scorsese was at my table. I said to my agent, “I can’t go, I have nothing to tell him!” But then [Giorgio] Armani took me aside and said, ‘We are going to do the red carpet!’
Green still doesn’t enjoy ritzy events, which she says is down to a lack of confidence. ‘I am very shy. It is a handicap. I am never good when there are lots of people. It is a thing from my childhood, I can’t even explain why.’
It is something that she has learnt to deal with, though, by taking herself off to the loo to do breathing exercises to calm herself, and wearing elaborate gowns (her favourite designer is Alexander McQueen) and melodramatic make-up as a kind of armour. ‘It protects me. Because otherwise it is very violent for me,’ she says. ‘I just wish sometimes that we didn’t have to talk, that we were just silent movie stars.’
And here is the conundrum, one that Green herself has said she does not quite understand: why someone so shy (although, one-on-one, drily funny, thoughtful and open) would do a job that is so emotionally exposing, both on screen and off it.
In a 2017 radio interview, Green’s mother revealed that Harvey Weinstein had attempted to physically assault her daughter when she was a young actor in a hotel room in Paris. ‘She managed to escape, but he threatened to destroy her professionally,’ said Jobert. Green has never been keen to go into details about the event, but she is happy to say how relieved she is that Weinstein has been sentenced to 23 years in prison. ‘I am grateful that justice has been served. I praise the brave women who risked so much in coming forward, not only their careers and reputations, but the pain that they have suffered in having to relive being raped in order to put this sexual predator out of harm’s way. Their courage has changed the world.’
This change is something that Green is living through – on the Friday before we meet, she attended the French César awards where Roman Polanski, who pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor in the US in 1977 but fled before sentence was passed (and with whom Green made the film Based on a True Story in 2017), was given the award for best director in absentia, resulting in many of the members of the audience walking out.
‘It was so tense,’ said Green. ‘I have never been in a situation like that before.’ She is enjoying the shift in the power dynamic in the film industry, working with female directors like Alice Winocour, making female-centric stories, like that of the astronaut Sarah, where there is not even a whiff of romance. ‘It is good, and there is still more to do,’ she says. ‘It is so radical – for men it is very hard, they take so many hits. There are very good men.’
One of the best men, as far as Green is concerned, is director Tim Burton, with whom she has collaborated on three films, most recently last year’s Dumbo. There have been rumours of romance between Green and Burton, who has two children with his former partner, actor Helena Bonham Carter, but Green has always denied this, maintaining that their relationship is purely professional. ‘My dream as a child, and later on, was always to work with him. I love his world. He is such a nice person as well.’
Green says she does not have a partner at the moment – her main companion is her miniature schnauzer, Winston. ‘Winston is so clever; very serious, very sensitive. I can’t lie to him,’ she says, showing me a picture of him, looking serious and sensitive in a tartan bow tie. ‘This is how I dress him.’
Green has lived in London since her early 20s, when she got a British agent and promptly moved into their spare bedroom in Primrose Hill. She loves London, but her circle is international – her sister, Joy, lives in Italy, on a vineyard with her Italian count husband and two children. ‘She is very different [to me], very down to earth. We are so different that it might have been a bit tense in the past, but we really get on now.’
When asked to elaborate on these sibling differences, Green considers, before saying, ‘Maybe I am a bit weird? If I mentioned tarot, things like this, she would go, “You are crazy.” So I don’t talk about any of that.’
Green became interested in tarot in 2014 when she was filming the Showtime series Penny Dreadful, a drama set in the Victorian occult underworld starring Josh Hartnett and Billie Piper. Green was nominated for a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Vanessa Ives, a young woman prone to satanic visions and demonic possessions.
‘If it [tarot] is done properly, it teaches you things about yourself. It is fast-forward therapy.’ She does not go to normal therapy, although she did a little when she was younger. ‘But if you have a few tools, you can become very connected.’
Her toolbox includes regular meditation. ‘I am very into this guru at the moment, Teal Swan, who lives in Costa Rica. She does guided meditations that really calm you.’ She also exercises every morning for 45 minutes, sometimes with a trainer, and uses the Wim Hof cold-water-therapy technique, which involves a daily 10-minute cold shower. ‘It is all about the breathing and helps you when you are stressed. It makes you get rid of all that s—t.’
These techniques are a proactive way of managing anxiety. But Green also likes a glass of red wine in the evening (‘Of course. I’m French. I have been doing that every day of my life since I was 18’), going for long walks, taking photographs, and compiling collages of black-and-white images.
She is not on social media – ‘it is very narcissistic and not in a great way’ – and her greatest pleasure is travel: trips to places like Namibia and Bhutan, long walking holidays, often alone. ‘The first day is always quite scary, but then you connect much better with your surroundings, with people as well. Your senses are more awakened.’
The opportunity to travel was just one of the reasons Green accepted a role in the upcoming adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. Set in the 1860s during the New Zealand gold rush, the BBC Two series stars Eve Hewson, the actor daughter of Bono, while Green plays scheming brothel-keeper Lydia Wells. ‘I love characters like that. You think she is one thing and then you discover that she is something else. Of course she is manipulative, but she is not a baddie. She is a very strong woman.’
Lydia is also an astrologer, another of Green’s interests. ‘I am completely into that stuff.’ Her star sign is cancer, and in July she will turn 40, although there will not be a party. ‘I am not a birthday girl at all. I always want everyone else to feel so good that I cannot relax.’ The fact that it is a landmark birthday is adding to Green’s feeling of unease. We talk about how age brings maturity, wisdom and a sense of acceptance about who we are.
‘That’s true. And then there’s the immediate thing of, “I’m going to get old, what did I achieve, are people still going to desire me?” Especially as an actor, I think, because I’ve always heard that when you reach 40, it is going to be difficult to get roles. What about as a woman: can you still be attractive, do you have children? If you don’t have children, are you kind of a social failure? These are clichés, but people say, “You don’t have children?” and you feel like not a woman when you say, “No, I don’t have them.” It is hard… But then, I feel like I am 12 still and now I am about to be 40. What happened there?’
And yet, she does have a plan… ‘I want to get a farm. I know it sounds like a whim, but it is something that I have been thinking about a lot. Maybe Wales, I love Wales. The scenery is amazing. Sitting in the city, it is choking me sometimes, and there is nothing better than to connect with nature. You feel whole.’
Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/eva-green-coping-crippling-anxiety-shyi-wish-silent-movie-sta

I truly appreciate the level of research & intentionality this film has concerning how they incorporated the variety of African cultures into creating the Wakandan cultural, costume, & visual designs in Black Panther. For example:
-The greeting of crossing one's right arm over the left across the chest then moving them straight down to one's sides is like that of the royal Egyptian gods & mummies (Egyptian gods were often portrayed bearing an ankh in each hand with arms crossed over their chest; the arms of royal male mummies during later dynastic periods were crossed @ the chest, as a reverential greeting toward the superior Egyptian gods they expected to meet in the afterlife; the arms of female mummies were usually laid straight @ their sides)
-The isiXhosa (Nguni) language of the Xhosa-Bantu from South Africa, as well as Xhosa & Nigerian Igbo (M’Baku) influenced accents
-The Ubuntu philosophy (“Ubuntu ngumtu ngabanye abantu”~“A person is a person through other people”) of South Africa a philosophical tenet embraced by T’Challa
-The Nsibidi (Nigeria), Punic (ancient Carthage/modern-day Tunisia), Adinkra (Ghana), Heiroglyphic (ancient Egyptian), & Bogolanfini cloth (Mali) iconography
-The homage to the Pan-African flag colors when they lined up Nakia (Green), T’Challa (Black), & Okoye (Red) on the elevated level of the underground Korean casino (The fact that the shot was taken on the elevated level is not lost on me.)
-The Pan-African background music selections & dancing styles -The all-female Ahosi/Mino military regiment of the Fon from the Republic of Benin & the Maasi warriors from Kenya & Tanzania
-The Fighting style of the Dora Milaje resembling that of the Donga staff fighting techniques of the Surma (Suri)/Mursi tribes of Ethiopia
-The ceremonial masks of the Dogon of Mali
-The weighted striking stick, spear, and shield wielded by T’Challa and Killmonger at Warrior Falls that favor the South African Zulu warrior weapons Induku, Iklwa (believed to be invented by Chief Shaka kaSenzangakhona aka Chief Shaka Zulu himself), and Isihlangu shields; weapons the Zulu warriors most likely wielded in the infamous battle of Isandlwana
-The martial arts techniques utilized at Warrior Falls likened to that of the Ukungcweka or Zulu stick fighting technique, Senegalese Laamb or Sudanese Dinka Bor wrestling, and even the influence of Afro-Brasilian Capoeira exhibited in T’Challa’s use of deceptive kicking and feline quadrupedal fighting poses/positions
-The South and East African long range/throwing clubs, like that of the Zulu’s Iwisa/Knobkierie clubs or the Rungu clubs of the Maasai Morans, wielded by M’Baku
-The Sudano-Sahelian architecture styles and the reimagined cylindrical towers reminiscent of Zimbabwe’s Shona architecture
-The lip plates & clay markings likened to the Mursi and Surma (Suri)/Mursi/Karo of Ethiopia, the Makonde of Tanzania & Mozambique, the Sara & Lobi of Chad, other Omo Valley tribes, &
-The Sapeur (La Sape) style of the designer dandies from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (“Les Sapeur Congolais”)
-The scarification/cicatrisation likened to those of the Toposa & Nuer from South Sudan, the Bodi & Surma of Ethiopia, the Karamojong of Uganda, & many others
-The Otjize & hair styles of the Himba of northern Namibia
-The Seanamarena blankets of the Basotho from Lesotho
-The Kente cloth of the Akan from south Ghana & other textiles like Maasai Shuka (Kenya & Tanzania), Kitenge (East, West, & Central Africa), Ankara/Wax Print (West Africa), Aso Oke (Nigeria), etc.
-The artistic designs inspired by Mali & Ndebele (Zibabwe/Botswana/South Africa) traditions
-The Headwraps and brilliant indigo robes/caftans donned by Zuri & his tribe being reminiscent of the Tuareg of the sub-Sahara
-The Zulu-inspired Isicholo/Inhloko hat donned by Queen Mother Ramonda -The Fula/Fulani & Tuareg inspired jewelry
-The Kiondo baskets of Kenya and many more I am sure.

WakandaForever