Milla Jovovich’s career was devastated by one harrowing moment: “Soul-sucking, demoralising”
Milla Jovovich is best known for movies where she kicks people’s heads in and shoots scary monsters in the face. As the face of the Resident Evil franchise, directed by her husband, Paul WS Anderson, she has blasted more zombies, clones, and other creepy things than you’ve had hot dinners. She broke out as Leeloo in the sci-fi classic The Fifth Element, has fronted another video game adaptation with Monster Hunter, and embarked on various other shooty, explodey, bloodthirsty quests across her long and successful career.
Despite having a kill count to rival Genghis Khan, the Ukrainian-born star has taken on some subtler roles. One of her earliest performances came in the romance movie Return to the Blue Lagoon, a sequel to the infamous original, while fans of Richard Linklater will remember her from his early hit, Dazed and Confused.
Set in a Texas high school in 1976 on the last day of term, the movie is a masterpiece of wandering, uncentralised narrative, with the plot flitting between different students as they encounter their own various pitfalls. Jovovich plays Michelle Burroughs, the girlfriend of resident drug dealer Kevin Pickford, played by Shawn Andrews. She doesn’t say an awful lot, but the image of her sitting with a guitar in hand, cigarette dangling effortlessly from her mouth, is one of the most defining from a movie littered with such visuals. It no doubt graced a number of bedroom walls in 1993.
Unfortunately for Jovovich, she doesn’t always associate the film with a good time in her life. “I’d had a really hard time as a child actor in Hollywood,” she told GQ. “I guess I’d never realised how savage adults could be when they criticised a child. It was just one of the most soul-sucking, demoralising experiences I’ve ever had. And especially being 15 at the time, it was such an integral part of my development, and it just made me very insecure and really solidified in my own head that I was not a good actress and that I was just a pretty face.”
As the film was shot over the summer of 1992, Jovovich would have been just 16 years old while playing Michelle. She had been enrolled in acting classes since the age of ten, a result of pushy parents, and landed her first professional gig as a pre-teen. By the time she was cast in Dazed and Confused, she’d already appeared in multiple high-profile movies and TV shows.
Like most child stars, she didn’t have it easy. She infamously began an affair with director Luc Besson on the set of The Fifth Element, despite him being 16 years her senior and married when they met. The pair wed in 1997, but were only together for two years. On the set of Dazed and Confused, Jovovich and Andrews became romantically involved for real and married in 1992. However, as he was 21 and she was only 16, her mother intervened and got the marriage annulled.
Being young in Hollywood is full of dangers, especially from predatory men. The film industry is full of people looking to get ahead at any cost, especially if they think they can manipulate or degrade someone younger and more naïve than themselves. Jovovich seems to have come out on the other side of the experience, but movie history is dotted with the cases of others who weren’t so fortunate.
