Plot: Because her village faces a decline in quality of life, Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) accepts her father’s (Ray Winstone) arrangement of marriage for her to Prince Henry (Nick Robinson), son of the evil Queen Isabelle (Robin Wright) who rules Aurea. Elodie hopes for romance in her marriage, but the final result is as far from that as it could get. Some of her family members fall for the fantastic facade that is Aurea, while others like her stepmother (Angela Bassett) suspect that something more sinister is at work behind the wealthy walls.
Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Writing Credits: Dan Mazeau
Cast: Millie Bobby Brown, Robin Wright, Angela Bassett, Nick Robinson, Brooke Carter, Ray Winstone & Shohreh Aghdashloo.
Music by: David Fleming
Genre: Action | Adventure | Fantasy
Filming Dates: February 2022 – May 2022
Filming Locations: London, England (UK) | Portugal
Release Date: March 8, 2024 on Netflix worldwide
Budget: $70,000,000 (estimated)
Runtime: 108 minutes
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong creature violence, action, and bloody images.
ROBIN WRIGHT AS THE EVIL QUEEN ISABELLE
Wright’s character, Queen Isabelle of Aurea, is the main villain of ‘Damsel’. Although her entire kingdom is behind the plot to sacrifice innocent young women to the dragon lurking below, Queen Isabelle is the most accepting of the plan— and the most willing to see it enacted at all costs. Queen Isabelle has an air of cruelty that her son simply doesn’t possess, even if he’s complicit in her schemes.
Queen Isabelle is the brains behind the operation that is Henry and Elodie’s wedding. She confers with the red-robed women and leads the three rituals that honor the kingdom. She sacrifices Elodie to the dragon because of the village’s long history with the beast.
“She’s able to appear charming to lure the victims in, as is her task,” says Wright. “She’s also creative in her designs, the web she weaves, to trap the sacrificial lambs. She makes Elodie feel it’s a privilege that she was chosen, and then her barbs come out!”
PRINCESS BUTTERCUP VERSUS QUEEN ISABELLE
Back in 1987, Robin Wright took on the key role of Princess Buttercup in Rob Reiner’s classic fantasy comedy ‘The Princess Bride’.
Now, 37 years later, she’s returned to the fairytale genre for Netflix’s new action-adventure flick ‘Damsel’, only this time she’s approaching things from the other side.
In the film, she plays the wicked Queen Isabelle, who is responsible for throwing Millie Bobby Brown’s Princess Elodie into a cave, where she’s greeted by a terrifying fire-breathing dragon.
Wright wasn’t initially thinking about the connection between the two films when she first signed on, but now that it’s been pointed out she can’t help but wonder if her two characters are somehow linked.
“Somebody recently in the press brought up the question, do you think Queen Isabelle is the older Princess Buttercup?” she muses. “And I said, ‘No, please say no, that can’t be! That’s blasphemy, don’t even think of such things!’ And then we were all giggling, saying maybe she did grow up to be Queen Isabelle and she just became more angry!”
ROBIN WRIGHT ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
The thing that attracted Wright to the part was a conversation she had with the film’s Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. Wright explains that Fresnadillo was eager to get across the fact that he wanted to do something a little different from the traditional fairytale, to subvert some of the tropes of the genre that we’re so used to seeing.
“The way he was describing to me how this was going to be an unconventional fairytale and in what way it was going to be, that was enticing,” she says. “I just was like, this is different. He’s turning it on its head a little bit, the quintessential template. He stepped out of the box with these two women, and I think it’s a really good message for young girls: It’s not a damsel in distress that’s being rescued by somebody, it’s self-survival.”
ROBIN WRIGHT ABOUT MILLIE BOBBY BROWN
Wright had seen some of Brown’s work in the early seasons of ‘Stranger Things’ – “when she was a little wee one” – and was very impressed working alongside her on the new film.
“She’s so enigmatic [and] has an incredible presence on screen,” she says. “And so authentic, right? There’s not a false bone in her body when she delivers lines. She’s very connected. When I met her, she was 18 or 19 years old, a young woman, and look at all that she’s accomplished. It’s pretty impressive!”
Although Wright’s time on set was relatively limited – she worked around seven days scattered throughout the shoot – she nonetheless found herself striking up a bond with Brown, especially when she arrived to shoot some scenes in Portugal, which was the first time they were able to “relax and giggle”.
And while Queen Isabelle and Princess Elodie have rather an antagonistic relationship in the film, the same is not true for that between Wright and Brown.
“I actually felt more like her surrogate mother,” she says. “Because she was barefoot the whole movie! I was like, ‘Get some flip flops, make sure she puts those on in between takes.'”
ROBIN WRIGHT ABOUT RAY WINSTONE
There was one other cast member Wright was especially keen to work with again: Ray Winstone. The pair had previously co-starred in the 2007 motion-capture film ‘Beowulf’, and Wright says she’s a huge fan of the English actor’s work.
“Sexy Beast is one of my most favorite movies of all time,” she says. “I’ve never been really starstruck in my life. But when I first met Ray, I was starstruck, because I love that movie so much.”
ROBIN WRIGHT ABOUT THE RELEASE OF DAMSEL
As with so many of Netflix’s original films, ‘Damsel’ will be skipping a theatrical window, instead going straight to streaming. Wright can understand why this decision has been taken, but she admits to being somewhat disappointed that audiences won’t have the chance to see the film projected.
“I thought for sure that they would release this one in the theatre, because it’s so powerful on the big screen,” she says. “But obviously, it’s a business decision. And that is how our business has changed, very much so. When you think about it, coming out of COVID and coming out of the strike, how very different working in this business is now. I don’t even know what to expect. A lot of people don’t, I don’t think. What is our future? Did Barbie and Oppenheimer open the cinemas back up? To a degree, probably yeah. But it doesn’t feel like it’s part of our landscape like it used to be.”
BEHIND THE SCENES PICTURES
Damsel | Official Trailer | Netflix
