adore_milla | Gotham (US) - September 2010 Photoshoot + Interview + Video

One for All
Milla Jovovich may work hard, but she has her priorities set as straight as they come.

Milla Jovovich is currently working as if this could be her last year on earth. The actress, model, sometime musician and designer is promoting Stone, a legal drama with Robert De Niro and Edward Norton debuting this fall, as well as filming the Hitchcockian thriller Faces in the Crowd. She just finished an indie film with William H. Macy, Mary Steenburgen and Tim McGraw called Dirty Girl, where she plays a down-on-her-luck young mom living in a trailer park. She might fly to Russia for a role in a Russian comedy.

There’s the press for the fourth installment of the Resident Evil franchise, which made her every young geek’s fantasy, and the role in Bringing Up Bobby, an independent comedy directed by fellow actress-cum-model Famke Janssen. And she’s preparing to star in a remake of The Three Musketeers (slated for next year) directed by her husband, director Paul W.S. Anderson.

It’s exhausting just talking to her about it all. But Jovovich is no stranger to hard work. Modeling since she was 11 and acting since 13, she has become more than recognizable in the span of her career—most recently as the face of Ann Taylor’s spring/summer campaign. (The floral sheath dress she wore for the ads in May sold out across the country.) Now she’s the star of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week campaigns around the world. “I’ve never worked with a car as my costar,” she laughs. Despite the nonstop schedule, there might be an end in sight. In a couple of years her two-year-old daughter, Ever, will be ready for school, and 34-year-old Jovovich thinks that at that point, it’s only fair she settle down and be a full-time mom.

“Once she starts school, I want to stay in one place and be there to take her to school and just have a normal life,” she explains by phone from Winnipeg, where she’s filming Faces in the Crowd. “When your kid is in school, it’s hard to just pick her up and travel. So right now I am taking advantage of the time when she is mobile.”

The approaching downtime will let Jovovich focus on her other passions: music—she contributed to several of her films’ soundtracks and produced a studio album called The Divine Comedy—and design. In 2003 she and her friend, Carmen Hawk, launched a clothing line called Jovovich-Hawk, which sold in Fred Segal, Harvey Nichols and more than 50 stores across the world. They even had a capsule collection with Target’s Go line. But the pair shuttered the project in 2008 after it put too many demands on their time.

“It was all fun when Barneys ordered four pairs of slacks and we could do it ourselves,” she says. “But when people started ordering 400 pairs of slacks and we had to go out to the factory, it got to the point where we were both exhausted. So after we did our thing with Target, we agreed we should quit, and down the line maybe try to get a licensing deal.”

Along with dipping back into the things she loves outside of acting, Jovovich also plans to work on bringing little Ever a sibling. “It’s been tough because this year piled up on me starting last fall, and I thought, Wow, I might not be able to have a baby this year,” she says. “Right now we are shooting for next year because I don’t want there to be too much of an age difference between the two of them. So it’s gotta happen, and it’s gotta happen soon.”

Making it happen means finishing up The Three Musketeers, which starts filming this month. The 3-D action-adventure extravaganza stars Jovovich in the coveted role of Milady de Winter, plus Oscar winner Christoph Waltz as Cardinal Richelieu and Orlando Bloom as the Duke of Buckingham. While Jovovich was dying to do the role of de Winter, she didn’t expect her husband to play favorites in the casting—she even suggested other actors for the role.

“I gave my two cents, even for my part,” she explains. “I told him that I really wanted this movie, but it’s his movie, and I even suggested some other actresses who I thought would be good for the part. But it ended up that the studio was really happy with me, and I felt wonderfully blessed to be brought on.” This remake’s 3-D format amps up the action factor above and beyond other interpretations of Alexandre Dumas’ classic novel. Jovovich plans to bring a bit of her action experience from the Resident Evil films to her role.

“I have been inspired for the film’s costumes by the paintings of [17th-century artist] Anthony van Dyck, and looking at those paintings you get a sense of just how heavy these women’s dresses really were,” she says. “It made me think of those old Chinese films where the women use their dresses as weapons, so I am coming up with some very cool ideas about how to use my costume as a weapon.”

Given her track record for getting things done, don’t think for a minute she won’t make it happen.