Resident Evil’s villains are unlikable. Their actors are fine with that
The world of the Resident Evil is, largely, a clear-cut one: You have your good guys and your bad guys, the latter of which come in the form of both horrifying creatures (zombies and spiders and the like) and the capitalistic monsters at the Umbrella Corporation.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Resident Evil season 1.]
Though Netflix’s Resident Evil series takes all it can get from the Resident Evil universe — with everything and anything being taken as canon gospel — the actresses who play two of the show’s most nefarious characters are glad their roles feel enigmatic in their antagonism.
“I mean, ‘misunderstood’ means complex [for characters], right?” Adeline Rudolph, who plays grown-up Billie Wesker, tells Polygon. “If you’d ask Siena [Agudong], young Billie [...] it’s a completely different show, right?”
For her, older Billie captured the promise that a television show could offer the Resident Evil franchise decades into its lifespan: How does a character live, or even thrive, in such a cutthroat world? In the end, she embraced that Billie was a character who had nuance but a singular focus of the world.
“I think for older Billie, it’s absolutely a story of heartbreak, and pain, and trauma. Of survival. And then choosing a path of how she feels like she can survive the best in this future world,” Rudolph says. “She’s very one-sided with [how she sees the future] because she’s gone through so much that she now believes she has the ultimate answer to how we’re going to move forward. Because everything else has been destruction in her life.”
Though she comes from a very different standing in the story, Paola Núñez feels the same about her character, Evelyn, who’s the villainous, pore-free face of the
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