A battle royale for ‘difficult’ Bond girl
Even for the breakout star of Casino Royale, it is a high-stakes gamble.
Eva Green, the ex-Bond girl, is rolling the dice with a lawsuit against the production company behind a science fiction film that never saw the light of day.
She is due to give evidence in Britain’s High Court on Wednesday, seeking $US1m ($1.44m) from the backers of the film, A Patriot, in which she would have played a border guard living under a future authoritarian state.
The film, which was also due to star Charles Dance and Helen Hunt, was meant to begin production in August 2019 but was pushed back by two months before being cancelled entirely.
But like Bond’s paramour and MI6 colleague Vesper Lynd, who turns out to be a double agent, Green, 42, is being accused of duplicity.
The production company, White Lantern Film Britannica, is countersuing the actor for $US5m after discovering text and email conversations Green was forced to hand over before the trial.
The company accuses her of “making unreasonable demands”, “unlawful conspiracy” and having “no desire to complete production of the film”.
It is alleged she demanded four handpicked assistants to work just for her, for fees that were “non-negotiable”. “They cannot work for less and I cannot work without them,” she wrote. When that was denied, she told her agent, Charles Collier, she would instead be “obliged to take (producer Jake Seal’s) shitty peasant crew members from Hampshire”.
She said one producer was “a f..king moron”, and that Seal also “needs to get fired”.