Take Three: Eva Mendes

Craig here with this week's Take Three. Today: Eva Mendes

Take One: Live! (2007)
Building on her dramatic work in We Own the Night the same year, Mendes took on another (semi) serious role, one deviously tinged with delicious black comedy, as TV executive Katy in Bill Guttentag’s Reality TV mock-doc Live! Perfectly styled in sharp attire and a coffee ‘to-go’ in hand, Mendes' Katy is ambitious, ruthless and most likely hollow on the inside. She has grand ideas. One of them kick-starts Live!’s plot: six members of the public will play Russian roulette live on air; the sole survivor is the winner. Her flippant excuse, while delicately biting into a strawberry:

Hey, I didn’t invent the game, I’m just making it hip again.”

Katy’s the kind of person who thinks that if all of life – including death – isn’t caught on camera it’s not worth living. And she doesn’t want ratings lower than her morals - to her it’s not lives at stakes but viewing figures. She’s the kind of corporate cannibal who caresses a hefty golf club whilst listening to her staff’s TV pitches. But also, quite ironically, has a poster for La Dolce Vita behind her office desk. She’s a vile creature of business, hungry enough to have Sigourney Weaver’s Working Girl Katherine Parker in Working Girl for breakfast and Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen in Network for lunch. (Apparently Network is personal favourite film of Mendes’, one which served as her inspiration for this part.) Mendes’ Katy is essentially the dark centre of this goading morality exercise. It’s a performance so exactingly played, so attuned to the film’s intentions and compulsively watchable, that Mendes’ dramatic capability can’t be called into doubt. Does Katy get her way? Or does she get her comeuppance? Tune in to find out...

Two more takes after the jump...

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