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Milla Jovovich

Hollywood can adapt books into movies people want to watch. Graphic novels, old TV shows, even inanimate plastic toys are turned into crowd-pleasing pictures.

But videogames — the success rate of games-into-films ranks right up there with BP’s ability to cap a gushing undersea oil well. Shout Wing Commander or In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale at a party full of Hollywood executives and watch them scurry to the nearest exit.

Then there’s the Resident Evil franchise. This month the series’ fourth film, Resident Evil: Afterlife, hits screens. While the films don’t break box-office records, they continue to be profitable and boast a very loyal fan base.

Why? Credit the quality and popularity of the games themselves — which focus on human survivors battling zombies created by a virus unleashed by the nasty Umbrella Corporation — and credit the series star, Milla Jovovich, a model-turned-actor-turned-ass-kicker.

We caught up with the 34-year-old Jovovich on the Toronto set of Resident Evil: Afterlife last fall. Filming was almost complete as Jovovich and co-stars Ali Larter and Wentworth Miller shot a simple scene in which they walk into a dark room with flashlights and guns drawn. They do it a few times, and each time Jovovich finishes the scene with a terse one-liner, something like “this doesn’t feel right.”

This fourth flick, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who helmed the first Resident Evil movie in 2002 and is Jovovich’s husband, has hero Alice (Jovovich) leading survivors — including siblings Claire (Larter) and Chris (Miller) — deep into the Umbrella Corporation’s underground sanctuary to destroy the bad guys once and for all.

Afterlife has the biggest budget of all the Resident Evil movies, and was shot in 3D, using the same 3D system James Cameron used to make Avatar.

In the eight years she’s played her, Jovovich has molded Alice into a hardened hero with a taciturn sense of despair.

“In the beginning Alice was definitely very different,” says Jovovich on a break from shooting. “I was very inspired by Alice in Wonderland, that was sort of the character — this innocent girl going into this twisted world. But then I sort of got really inspired by Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, she’s a female Dirty Harry in a sense [laughs].

“That mysterious kind of person who gets things done, who doesn’t talk too much about themselves and you don’t see them cry, there’s a lot inside.”

While Alice remains tight-lipped, Jovovich is uncommonly verbose. She’s been tweeting from the Afterlife set and posting video blogs about the making of the movie for fanboys and girls to enjoy. “I was a little unsure at first, I’d never twittered before, but once I got the hang of it I was, ‘Oh, this is interesting, this is cool.’ These people have no clue what it is to be on a film set and suddenly I’m giving them a little taste of what goes on here,” says the actor.

“And something that is not interesting for us because we are doing it every day is really interesting for people [not in the industry]. There are over 70,00 people on my twitter page now, and maybe, like, four of those people have been negative.” Since filming Afterlife Jovovich’s twitter following has grown to almost 400,000.

Speaking her mind and living a very public life is something the Ukraine-born Jovovich has been doing since the age of 12, when she became a professional model and shot her very first magazine cover.

Her family moved to Los Angeles when Jovovich was five. She was raised by her Russian mother after her parents divorced and her father, a surgeon, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in a health insurance scam (he served five years).

Jovovich’s modelling career took off and she made the move into acting — and marriage — getting hitched to her Dazed and Confused co-star Shawn Andrews at age 16. That lasted less than two months (her mother had the marriage annulled), but Jovovich continued to express herself, this time as a singer, releasing her first CD at age 19.

More modelling, acting and another marriage — to her Fifth Element director, Luc Besson — followed, but it wasn’t until the Resident Evil franchise entered her life that the kinetic Jovovich found a touchstone both professionally and personally, grabbing hold of the kick-ass Alice role and series skipper Anderson. They have a two-year-old daughter, Ever, who watched mom work on the day of our set visit.

“It’s great, I get to have my family with me,” says Jovovich about making the film a family affair. But does she ever find it stressful to be directed by her husband?

“So far, no, but if we do five or six more of these, you never know [laughs]. No, I mean we have so much fun, I really feel like these movies wouldn’t be the same without Paul and his vision and his passion for them. He’s so into the games and it’s his love for them that brought this franchise to the table.”

And it’s refreshing that Jovovich never feels embarrassed about playing Alice, or starring in a videogame series, or kicking the dead stuffing out of zombies. The woman loves her work, and it shows. “I think this series has done a great job, we are on number four of giving people what they want and delivering a good product,” she says proudly.

“People know we love it, we are passionate about it and can feel it when they watch the movie. And it’s not just some random action film I’m doing to make a bunch of money, and I really don’t want to do it because I want to be a serious actress. It’s like, no, I do it because I really love it and I do it because I’m into it, and it makes me feel good.”

Ingrid Randoja is the deputy editor of Famous.

Milla Jovovich

Pretty Young Thing

Even at age 12 Milla Jovovich had a stare that could stop zombies. This early modelling shot was taken at her Beverly Hills home in May 1988 — one year after she’d scored her first magazine cover, for the Italian fashion magazine Lei.



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Cineplex Inc. ("Cineplex") is the largest motion picture exhibitor in Canada and owns, leases or has a joint-venture interest in 130 theatres with 1,352 screens serving approximately 70 million guests annually. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Cineplex operates theatres from British Columbia to Quebec and is the exclusive provider of UltraAVX™ and the largest exhibitor of digital, 3D and IMAX projection technologies in the country. Proudly Canadian and with a workforce of approximately 10,000 employees, the company operates the following top tier brands: Cineplex Odeon, Galaxy, Famous Players, Colossus, Coliseum, SilverCity, Cinema City and Scotiabank Theatres. Cineplex shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) under the symbol "CGX".