Eva Green is the face of Dior’s new perfume, Midnight Passion.
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Eva Green opens up in the new edition of Vanity Fair:
As midnight approaches at the Palais Garnier opera house, in Paris, a grand production is just getting underway. The sweeping marble stairway of the ornate cultural landmark is lined with dozens of handsome young factota dressed in black, and a director rushes around barking out urgent instructions into his walkie-talkie. Well-heeled guests are ushered upstairs to the mezzanine level, which has been tricked out with acres of fake foliage; the sound of Garden of Eden chirruping is being piped in to set the ambience.
This little soirée is being staged by Parfums Christian Dior to “celebrate the birth of a fragrance.” The program begins with the screening of a commercial for Dior’s new scent, Midnight Poison, directed by Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-Wai. The lavishly budgeted spot features Paris-born actress Eva Green floating through some kind of futuristic fairy-tale fantasy looking suitably ethereal in a billowing blue gown. The commercial is visually stunning, and makes about as much sense as most Wong Kar-Wai movies.
The 150 guests file into the grand hall of the opera house, and take their places at a long dining table where they tackle tricky hors d’oeuvres as a relentlessly morose soundtrack echoes around the high ceilings. The event’s M.C., with the kind of humorless gravitas that only the French can muster, announces the arrival of Mademoiselle Green, “a fascinating and free-spirited actress.” At the far end of the room, Green and Dior designer in chief John Galliano materialize inside some kind of giant snow globe. They emerge together and glide down to their positions at the head of the table.
The day after the event, Eva Green looks back at her big night at l’Opéra and agrees that “it was completely mad. In a good way, though! It’s glamour — I actually found it quite intimate; there were no cameras there.”
The 27-year-old Green is quite unabashed about lending her name to a scent—not for all the standard young-actress blather about artistic integrity and so forth. To Green, the whole idea of “keeping it real” is of no interest whatsoever.
“I love photo shoots where I can be like a pinup, not myself,” Green gushes. “Where I can be feminine, glamorous, dark … not like in real life. I hate it when you go in and they want you to be ‘natural,’ to be yourself. I just hate it. I love having fun. When they ask you to smile, I hate it. Of course I smile in my real life, but to do it on cue, that’s not spontaneous. I’d rather do something that’s like a little movie, like a little story, rather than just me — I feel naked.”
