Eva Green Will Break Your Heart

Since revealing her talent in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, Eva Green has become Hollywood’s go-to enchantress, playing the Bond girl in last year’s Casino Royale, and a 300-year-old witch in this winter’s fantasy event The Golden Compass.

Catching up with the French siren in Paris as she launches Christian Dior’s new scent, Midnight Poison, VF.com learns of her love for dressing up—and down.Eva Green looks back at her big night at l’Opéra and agrees that “it was completely mad. In a good way, though! It’s glamour—I actually found it quite intimate; there were no cameras there.”

The 27-year-old Green is quite unabashed about lending her name to a scent—not for all the standard young-actress blather about artistic integrity and so forth. To Green, the whole idea of “keeping it real” is of no interest whatsoever.

“I love photo shoots where I can be like a pinup, not myself,” Green gushes. “Where I can be feminine, glamorous, dark … not like in real life. I hate it when you go in and they want you to be ‘natural,’ to be yourself. I just hate it. I love having fun.

When they ask you to smile, I hate it. Of course I smile in my real life, but to do it on cue, that’s not spontaneous. I’d rather do something that’s like a little movie, like a little story, rather than just me—I feel naked.”This last sentiment is more than a little ironic given the nature of Green’s big-screen debut in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 2003 kink-fest, The Dreamers. In the film, set against the backdrop of the 1968 student revolts in Paris, Green—whose character was involved in an ill-fated ménage à trois that included her brother—had many scenes that did not require her to visit the wardrobe department.

Although the film itself was somewhat of a disappointment, reviewers tended to agree that Eva Green is indeed a fascinating and free-spirited actress.Neither Green’s agent nor her mother, the former actress Marlène Jobert, wanted her to do The Dreamers—not just because of the extensive nudity required, but because of the career vortex that swallowed up Maria Schneider, the young actress who starred in explicit sex scenes in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris.

Green herself had no doubts about taking on the Dreamers role, “because I’m such a big fan of Bertolucci.” She points out that the Italian director is “not a pervert” (the point is re-stated later, just in case) and says that her fellow actors helped her get comfortable with on-set nudity. “We were, like, five years old,” she says. “It was very innocent.”For most of her time in high school, Green would have been horrified by the very idea of performing in front of people, but she overcame her inhibitions and enrolled at a respected acting school in Paris. “I’m still shy,” Green insists. “Less shy now—when I was in school I’d pass out if the teacher asked me a question in class.

It’s very paradoxical; you’re so scared that it feels like you just have to go and do it. There’s something weird going on—I get this strange kind of focus. Like being on drugs.”Just in case you start getting the impression that Eva Green is that kind of fascinating and free-spirited actress, it should be pointed out that she lives a rather sedate life in Primrose Hill, a cloistered and verdant part of north London. She bought an apartment there, near a park where she goes to walk her Border terrier, Griffin, and occasionally to jog.

Her mother visits often from Paris. Green says she never goes to nightclubs, preferring instead to “chill out” at home to a bit of Mahler, or kick back with a Haruki Murakami book. She tends not to get recognized around London, she says: “I look like a geek, a teenager. I’m not Angelina Jolie.”Read more in Green Goddess