Vanessa Kirby, the actress who subdued Napoleon

Kirby appeared explosive, Machiavellian and proactive Like the White Widow. Kirby is very different in her role as Josephine de Beaurmois, the first wife of the ambitious Napoleon Bonaparte. Blessed flexibility. He has no dazzling blonde hair, no tight clothes, no lack of conscience in running his lucrative arms business. Dark haired and almost always glowing in the dark, dilutes the blue of your eyes until they turn into an ashen glowKirby provides a real lesson in this regard, as Ridley Scott prefers shadows to lights to portray his unstable characters. How to be important on every level without pretending to be what it looks like.

And likewise, she creates a Josephine who, in many of the film’s lavish shots, determines Napoleon’s fate, toying with him as well as touching him. This is not the cliché that behind every great man there is always a great woman., no matter how true it is. Scott and Kirby establish a genuine and intimate relationship with the character; It’s almost a love story neither with nor without you. Every gesture, seemingly affectionate, arrogant or condescending, every downward glance, the way Josephine waited for Napoleon in his retirement –Once Bonaparte agreed to leave her because she did not give him her children.– they tell us more than the wonderful talk around about the figure of Napoleon and of course Josephine to power, politics and betrayal.

Casting for major Hollywood productions boils down to the conflict between directors and producers. Kirby was not the first person chosen for this role. In the fall of 2021, news came that the name of the movie would be ‘Kitbag’, and that Joaquin Phoenix would be accompanied by ‘Killing Eve’ star Jodie Comer in the role of Josefina. This seemed like a natural choice, as Comer starred in Scott’s last film, ‘The Last Duel,’ opposite Adam Driver and Matt Damon. The project was delayed and Kirby eventually replaced Comer. It is not the first “real” character played by the London actress, who was born in 1988. Margaret, Countess of Snowdon and daughter of George VI and Elizabeth, in the first two seasons ofCrown‘. In any case, it is a very different royal family from the French royalty in the megalomaniacal times of Napoleon Bonaparte.

She seems to only do “blockbusters” (the author’s, of course), but Kirby has taken on a wide variety of roles in films such as Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó’s Canadian production ‘Fragments of a Woman’ (2020), in which she plays a woman. Losing a child during a negligent birth at home and in return Volpi Cup for best actress at the Venice Film Festival. His filmography includes more relevant or secondary characters in ‘The Destiny of Jupiter’ (2015) Wachowski brothers‘The Book Editor’ (2016) – Overshadowed by Jude Law, Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman – Florian’s action ‘exploitation’ like ‘Fast & Furiois: Hobbs & Shaw’ (2019) or ‘The Son’ (2022) ‘ Zeller.

I don’t know if Vanessa Kirby’s ‘Napoleon’ was a surprise, it was something that was already predicted before the movie was even finished but of course It is one of the pillars of such a pharaoh. film.