Ridley Scott’s unforgivable betrayal of Eva Green: “Her mother shouted at me”
Throughout Ridley Scott’s storied career, the director has delivered genre-defining classics and ill-advised misfires almost in equal measure. For every Alien, Gladiator, or Blade Runner, he has a nasty habit of making lesser movies like White Squall, Exodus: Gods and Kings, or The Counsellor. Interestingly, though, Scott is such a unique filmmaker that he once managed to make a masterpiece and a critically derided failure at the same time – and his leading lady, Eva Green, cried when she first watched the film.
When Green first sat down at the premiere of Kingdom of Heaven in 2005, she became visibly upset when she was forced to accept that vast swathes of her role as Sibylla of Jerusalem in the historical epic had wound up on the cutting room floor. Scott’s theatrical cut clocked in at 144 minutes, yet still left out so much material that Green believed her character arc became garbled and difficult to comprehend.
“It was a shock when I found out how much had gone, all of the best bits,” Green admitted to Digital Spy. “It is a pity because we spent so long getting it just right. I didn’t know how much had been cut until I went into the studio to record the soundtrack.”
The film told the story of Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom), a crusader who defends the Kingdom of Jerusalem from the Ayyubid Sultan Saladin, and his relationship with Sibylla, the sister of Jerusalem’s leper king, Baldwin IV. Critics accused the movie of being muddled, dull, and incapable of being livened by its battle scenes, which paled in comparison to those in Gladiator. Green was praised for what remained of her performance, but it was evident much of her work hadn’t made it to the screen.
However, seven months after Kingdom of Heaven’s middling theatrical reception, a Director’s Cut was released on DVD in time for Christmas. This time, critics fell over themselves to praise the film, which restored 45 minutes of material that Fox executives and test audiences encouraged Scott to excise. Suddenly, his true vision came into focus, and one reviewer called the new version “the most substantial director’s cut of all time”.
A conflicted Scott clearly regretted bowing to the studio’s demands, and admitted to Empire, “This is the one that should have gone out.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the character who benefited the most from the director’s cut was Green’s Sibylla, who went from a thinly drawn caricature to a three-dimensional character with agency, hopes, and dreams. An entire subplot was restored, showing Sibylla’s emotional torment regarding the leprosy that afflicted her brother. Baldwin IV first showed signs of the disease when he was 15, and was forced to wear a mask to conceal his disfigurement. However, he somehow functioned as king until he died at 23 or 24.
In historical records, it was claimed that Sibylla’s child died at 13 or 14, supposedly from the same leprosy that took her brother’s life. So, in Scott’s film, the harrowing subplot showed how she made the decision to euthanise her own son, because “She could not bear to see her child go through what her brother would go through with an incurable disease.”
This subplot accounted for a substantial 17 minutes of screentime, and according to Scott, Green “never forgave” him for cutting it the first time around. Amusingly, he also claimed Green’s mum gave him hell for the decision. “Her mother shouted at me,” Scott chuckled to Indie Wire in 2025. Mrs Green exclaimed, “How can you do this?” to which he could only respond, “I know, I’m sorry!”
