Diane Kruger as Helen is a terrible mistake. When I first saw the movie 10 years ago I was taken aback the second I saw Helen. I watched the movie again last night and had the same impression.
Now Diane Kruger is pretty, but she is no stunner, has zero presence and is absolutely not an actress. In all the scenes she is stiff and unexpressive like a broom.
Angelina Jolie would have been a great Helen. Or Catherine Zeta-Jones.
I thought Diane did look stunning in Troy, wheni first saw her i thought woow she is one of the most beautiful women i ever seen. Right now she still looks beautiful, but i think she was ridiculously stunning in this film sh ehas nevre looked more beautiful.
You are so right, Scott. I have said elsewhere she is wooden and of average looks. To think of all of the stunningly attractive actresses the director could have chosen to play Helen. Miscasting on a grand scale, I regret to say.
She was actually a last minute addition to the cast. The director originally didn't want to have Helen in the movie because he felt no actress could live up to her beauty. The studio pressured him to include her so he cast Kruger.
"I'm gonna show you something beautiful: Everyone screaming for mercy."
My husband and I went to see this movie. When Diane Kruger showed up on screen as Helen, my husband said to me "she isn't that good looking". Then a couple of years back I was reading an article about her. Diane claimed her job during Troy was to "stand there and be beautiful". Wait...what?! Oh plueeze.
Natalie Portman would have been a much better choice.
I agree. She's pretty, but in a very bland, conventional way. They really needed to find someone more striking, in my opinion. Although perhaps that was the point of the movie - they clearly went for a more realistic telling (i.e., no gods, etc.) so perhaps the director was reinforcing the point that the war was never really about Helen. She was just an ordinarily pretty woman who ran off with a Trojan prince, giving Agamemnon the excuse he needed to start a trade war. As the years have gone by, the legend has grown so that she has become "the face that launched a thousand ships". Still, I think it would have been better to go with someone more strikingly beautiful - it would have been a lot more obvious, then, why Paris would violate the guest right, which was sacred in ancient times.
She's pretty, but in a very bland, conventional way.
Yes, you're right about the the film emphasising that the war never really being about Helen. This was really highlighted, I thought, when Brian Cox (who I thought was great) as Agamemnon dismissively refers to her, sneeringly, as "Your pretty wife" when talking to Menelaus.
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