[We ♥ Milla Jovovich]

THINK MILLA Jovovich, the hard-hitting heroine of "Resident Evil" fame, is just another model who decided to become an actress? Think again. Jovovich, whose family left Ukraine when she was 5, was an actress first, starting at the age of 9. She took lessons - her mother was also an actress - and got her first role at 11.

When she needed new head shots, the photographer put "a bunch of makeup on me," as she recalls it, and sent the photos to the owner of a modeling agency, whom he knew. When people saw the photos, Jovovich said, they were taken aback by how mature the young Milla looked, but she says she was merely pretending to be her mom dressing up for a night out.

"That, however, was my weird little doorway into the modeling world," she said last month at the Toronto International Film Festival. "The modeling really took off in a big way and there was a lot of controversy and brouhaha about my age and what I was exuding in pictures."

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Hollywood’s preeminent zombie-hunting ex-model, Milla Jovovich, took time out of her busy shooting schedule on the Germany-based set of The Three Musketeers, her husband Paul W.S. Anderson’s foray into the realm of period-accurate, 3D adaptations of cherished literary classics, to chat with me about her gripping new drama Stone, in which she stars alongside Edward Norton and Robert De Niro. To her credit, she successfully parried my repeated attempts to bait her into making fun of the curious hairstyle that adorns Norton’s head in the film. You win this round, Jovovich.

Your role in Stone is quite a bit different than what we’ve grown used to seeing from you. I was curious about how it came up on your radar, and were you surprised that it did?
I definitely was really happy to get the script. Since having my baby, I’ve felt very much more open to just going out, performing, writing and being an artist in general, and feeling like this newfound confidence as a mom and a newfound confidence in myself. Part of that bled over into my film career in the sense that I really wanted to go out and audition for things, really keep on my toes. I was really just into the whole process of being a performer again, just going out and reading for a lot of different stuff. When this came up, of course I just jumped on it ... I compelled by these sort of flawed personalities and these grey areas and the fact the script didn’t really put everything in a neat little package for people. It’s very rare that you get scripts that don’t sort of shove an opinion down your throat, and this is one of them. So I was very interested in the subject matter and very interested in the characters and of course, working with Edward and Bob was unbelievably attractive. What actor wouldn’t want to work with such amazing artists?

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On-screen, actress-model Milla Jovovich has been many things: a dippy stoner-folkie, a pure-as-the-driven-snow Catholic martyr, a vigilant zombie-slayer. But in her latest film, the bleak, ruminative drama Stone, her character isn’t so easily defined. As Lucetta, a morally challenged free spirit whose husband (Edward Norton) prods her to convince his parole officer (Robert De Niro) to release him, she’s effervescent and dark, an innocent and a seductress. Reviews of Stone have been mixed, but they tend to praise Jovovich’s gutsy, unexpected dramatic turn. (This, just a month after Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth installment of the action franchise she carries, celebrated its biggest worldwide opening yet.) The A.V. Club caught up with the ebullient Jovovich to explain her unlikely career trajectory and how her latest role is possibly her most humbling.

The A.V. Club: Your Stone character is fairly complicated. What’s your take on her?
Milla Jovovich: My first take on her was that she’s kind of like this light in the script—very joyous and fun and tactile and wild and free—in comparison to the other personalities surrounding her, who are all sort of caged in their worlds. I was very attracted to that freedom she has.

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With no fewer than eight films in the pipeline, 'Resident Evil: Afterlife' box office queen Milla Jovovich ($236 million worldwide and counting) hasn't had much time to think of anything but her movie roles of late. However, she admits, "Now that my daughter is almost three, thoughts of a second baby are definitely in my head. I would love to have a big family."

At the same time, the mother of little Ever Gabo Anderson is enjoying her first daughter so much she might take things slow. "Ever is just getting to that stage where she's growing into a little person. She's out of the baby stage, and sometimes I just want to spend time with her and give her my undivided attention instead of going back into that baby world again with a second child. Three, four and five are such great ages."

But part of the big family idea means more free time, Jovovich says. "This has been an unusual year. It's a tight year." Her latest film, the critically-acclaimed drama 'Stone' with Edward Norton and Robert DeNiro, opens in limited release Friday, Oct. 8.

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