It’s been over a year since we found out that Damsel would be both a Netflix film and a book, but we’ll soon get the movie version starring Millie Bobbie Brown as the titular character who—twist!—saves herself from doom and death.
As the trailer for the film suggests, Brown’s character, Elodie, marries prince charming only to be sacrificed to the kingdom’s resident dragon, who purportedly likes eating fair maidens. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo described the situation Elodie finds herself in.
“This princess has to manage a very difficult situation with no help at all,” he said. “If you think about the history of these kind of stories, in terms of the cinema, the princess is always being helped by somebody: the prince, the father, the king. What [writer Dan Mazeau] did with this was adapting the story into a much more contemporary idea of a woman surviving by herself.”
He added: “I think this character represents an evolution in the roles that [Brown’s] played in her career. In this movie, she does a big step in terms of embracing a really strong independent woman. Not at the beginning, because this is about a girl who’s very dutiful with her father, and she’s flying with the destiny that this family and this kingdom is thinking for her. But she has to grow up. She has to become strong and independent. Millie incarnates that in such an amazing way.”
There you have it! We’ve seen glimpses of this transformation as Elodie loses her ruffly garments and picks up a sword in her journey to survive. We’ve also seen some of the additional cast in the trailer, which includes Robin Wright, Angela Bassett, Nick Robinson, Brooke Carter, Ray Winstone, and the voice of Shohreh Aghdashloo, who plays the aforementioned dragon!
Damsel comes out on Netflix on March 8, 2024. Here’s a poster to keep you entertained until then:
