What happened to Elle Driver in ‘Kill Bill’?
Elle Driver is arguably the most villainous character in Quentin Tarantino’s two volumes of Kill Bill, including even the saga’s eponymous anti-hero.
She initially plans to kill Uma Thurman’s character, The Bride, via lethal injection while she’s in a coma by sneaking into her hospital ward dressed as a nurse. Bill himself, who is, by this point, her lover, stops her from killing The Bride while she is unconscious and unable to fight for herself, as he claims the act would “lower” them.
Elle Driver also kills Bill’s brother Budd, one of her fellow members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, in an especially treacherous and brutal manner. She enters his trailer with a suitcase full of money to buy the sword he stole from The Bride before he buried her alive. Inside the suitcase, Driver has hidden a black mamba snake, which strikes Budd with a fatally venomous blow the moment he opens it.
If that’s not enough, she then reveals that she’d previously killed The Bride’s martial arts master Pai Mei by poisoning him, too. Pai Mei had plucked out Driver’s after she had shown him contemptuous disrespect. This is the reason for the eyepatch she wears throughout both Kill Bill films.
So, when The Bride miraculously escapes her underground coffin and confronts Elle Driver in Budd’s trailer, it’s hard to feel too sorry about what happens next. As the two women lock swords, The Bride stares Driver down before snatching her other remaining eyeball from its socket.
While Elle Driver writhes around screaming in agony, The Bride casually drops the eye on the floor, squashes it beneath her foot and prepares to leave with her sword. We get a brief shot of the black mamba again, coiled and hissing, before The Bride limps out into the desert.
Although we don’t see or hear exactly what happens to Elle Driver after this point, the trailer door theatrically closing by itself effectively signals her impending death. We can safely assume that the black mamba is going to come across her crashing around the trailer sooner rather than later and finish her off with a single, venomous bite.
Daryl Hannah, the actor who played Elle Driver, has explained how Tarantino changed the script for this scene days before it was shot. It originally read as a samurai sword fight outside in the desert between The Bride and Elle Driver. According to Hannah, in this version, The Bride “swipes her sword” at Driver’s throat, from which “a little spray of fine mist” escapes.
She joked that in the end, Tarantino “didn’t have the heart” to kill her character off. On the contrary, it could be the writer-director’s sadistic side on display in the final version. Rather than suffering a simple throat slit, Driver stumbles around with blood streaming from her empty eye socket. And the additional excruciating pain of a mamba’s poisonous venom seeping through her body is left to our imaginations.
Watch the iconic clip from Kill Bill: Volume 2 below.
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