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Friday, July 15, 2022

“Resident Evil” Star Ella Balinska on Lickers, Action, and Getting Drenched in Blood [Interview]

Netflix‘s “Resident Evil” is now available to stream globally, unleashing a new evolution of the popular horror franchise.

The live action series stars Ella Balinska (Charlie’s Angels) as Jade Wesker, who undergoes an action horror-fueled quest in 2036. Jade encounters no shortage of monsters, human and otherwise, that frequently force her into survivor mode.

Ahead of the series’ release, Bloody Disgusting spoke with Balinska on her approach to the action, her favorite monster, and how messy it gets playing an action-horror heroine.

Unlike previous characters Balinska has played, Jade Wesker isn’t a highly trained fighter. It meant taking a different approach to the character’s combat skills.

She explains, “Up until this point in my career, I’ve played characters that are very well trained in the scenarios they are thrown into in their character arcs. Jade, however, is someone who has just picked up what she’s learned along the way and runs with it, as imperfect as it is. So that was different for me because I’m so used to having these fight sequences that are heavily choreographed; I can pick it up at any beat, and off we go. But this, when push came to shove on, when cameras rolling, you’ve got Zeroes coming at you, which are the zombies in full prosthetics, gore, they were in contacts, they can hardly see, we’re shooting in the middle of the night. We couldn’t get a perfect take if we tried. We wanted it to have that messiness. We wanted it to have that danger element, which is so in sync with the Resident Evil franchise.”

That messiness also includes a ton of blood, monster slime, and entrails as Jade battles through zombie hordes and beyond.

Balinska shared what it was like filming, “Sticky, to say the least. Me and that bottle of red glycerin got very intimate. There’s a funny anecdote; every day, we’d walk onto the set to see where we were in the story and go into the costume trailer. We’d see these jumpsuits, Jade’s iconic red jumpsuit, and we have about 30 from a scale of pristine clean to absolute chaos of gore and dirt. We figure out where we are, and we go, ‘Yep, this is the one for today.'”

“Resident Evil” boasts no shortage of creatures, but there’s a clear standout for Balinska: the Lickers. The actor breaks down what it was like filming the specific sequence with the iconic franchise monster.

“The Lickers themselves were an amazing crew of stunt performers and an equally amazing team of rigors who were picking them off like the prey that they were. But at the same time, that imagination aspect of those creatures that were fully created in post-production.”

Zeroes and Lickers are only the beginning of the creature variety. Balinska teased what else fans can look forward to this season.

“I will say this. If you can only imagine what they did with the Tyrant, you can imagine what they did with other creatures walking this earth. Let’s put it that way.”

You can read our review of the show’s first season right here.