Marion Cotillard, a great actress, has won an Oscar, and has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards. Her endless list of great performances is the reason why she graduated to Hollywood acting after her incredible success in France.
Yet, whenever Cotillard’s name gets brought up in fanboy circles, it’s her performance as Talia al Ghul in 2012’s “The Dark Knight Rises” that gets pointed out, more specifically her awkward death scene inside a crashed vehicle. It all just felt very off. Was it the angle? Was it the acting? A bit of both, actually.
Cotillard has decided to reflect on her much-ridiculed death scene in ‘Dark Knight Rises,’ which had been the victim of mocking memes and Nolan fan backlash. She’s telling FranceTV that it’s all her fault:
I couldn't find the right position. I was stressed. Sometimes it happens, we screw something up. And this, I screwed up
Towards the end of the final part of Christopher Nolan's acclaimed ‘Dark Knight’ trilogy, Talia’s final moments, following a devastating crash, are shot in very awkward fashion by Nolan, and Cotillard’s wooden acting, not to mention her thick accent, definitely didn’t help.
A few years ago, Cotillard had a different take on her character's death scene while speaking to Allocine. She subtly laid the blame at Nolan’s feet, and for good reason, he should have known better than to use the take that ended up in the the released version of the film.
No matter, can we all agree that “The Dark Knight Rises,” although thrilling in parts, was this incredibly flawed movie in Nolan’s filmography? 13 years later, it’s probably not the trilogy closer that many expected to get after the resounding set up of “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight.”