Amber Heard plays Kevin Costner’s slinky boss in “3 Days to Kill.”
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Amber Heard has a ball playing Vivi, the trigger-happy, unsympathetic boss to Kevin Costner’s retirement-age operative in “3 Days to Kill.” Vivi is all deadpan one-liners, stilettos and gunplay, something right out of the imagination of French auteur Luc Besson. This makes sense, since the filmmaker conceived the story and co-wrote the script. But Heard’s character’s high-ranking position in the CIA came as something of a surprise to the actress, as it’s something she didn’t find out about until after she’d finished filming.
This doesn’t seem too bad, as far as work goes.
I’ll tell you what isn’t bad: driving through the streets of Paris, shooting a gun out of the window while Kevin Costner tries to steer for you, or getting in a fistfight with a stripper in front of [director] McG’s cameras. I had this incredible heightened reality that I had to exist in — I’m basically in a latex suit, full corset, a gun on my hip, shooting another gun with my free hand, wearing a platinum blonde wig and red lipstick, and this is right before I jump out of the car and assassinate a gangster. I look over and I see the Arc de Triomphe or the Eiffel Tower and I’m in a gunfight. It was a very interesting way to see Paris that I didn’t quite get from the tour bus.
They don’t usually supply handguns on tours.
No. Unless you’re in Texas, maybe.
Your character is in a very Luc Besson world, which just seems like a fun place to be.
Yeah, that was straight out of Luc Besson’s head. There’s something very liberating about playing a character that has no respect for the rules and the physical laws and the social norms that the rest of us are bound by. McG is a lot like Vivi in the fact that he’s not really bound by the same standards or stereotypes or rules or expectations that other people are. He was fine having this dynamic of a younger woman like myself being the overbearing boss in ways — almost a sadistic boss — to Kevin Costner’s character. And normally you don’t see that dynamic. You would see younger girl and a man like Kevin and you would imagine the dynamic be a romantic one or paternal, one of the two. You don’t expect this relationship. I liked that.
That sadistic boss is part of the “new CIA,” as they call it in the film.
Yeah, but that’s something that kind of developed after. When we filmed this, there was no real explanation for who she was or who she worked for. So that is something that’s come in the process of tweaking and reshooting.
So the opening scene of you at CIA headquarters was added in later?
Oh, I did that a couple of months ago. I haven’t seen the finished film, but yeah, we shot that stuff just recently.
In keeping with that Luc Besson world, you had some pretty impressive costumes. Any particular favorites?
None of them were my favorite, I’ll just put it that way. None of the wardrobe was fun to wear. Maybe with the exception of that opening scene [that’s more business casual], that was fine for me to do. What wasn’t fine was wearing a latex dress in the dead of winter in Paris in heels running through cobblestone streets. There’s this wonderful designer who made a lot of the clothes, he’s a Japanese dressmaker who makes all latex stuff. And as you know, nothing protects against the elements like a thin layer of latex. [Laughs]
