Sure, it was dying her pubic hair and getting doused in shit that caught everybody’s attention before Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book was released in the US, but it was Carice Van Houten’s masterful performance as a Jewish woman resisting the Nazis by sleeping with an SS officer in WWII Holland that made the movie great. Van Houten wasn’t just beautiful, she was tough and real and wowed me from the very beginning of the movie to the very end.
Now she’s going to get a chance to wow more US audience members as she has taken the role of Tom Cruise’s wife in Valkyrie, Brian Singer’s movie about German generals attempting an assassination of Adolph Hitler. Jeremy got a look at the script and wrote about it here.
While Jeremy wasn’t taken with the script itself, the movie has an almost impeccable cast, including Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Patrick Wilson, Stephen Fry and Tom Wilkinson. While you’d think that pretending to be in love with Tom Cruise is so easy a gig that even Katie Holmes can do it, I hope that Van Houten gets some room to show her stuff in this movie (and no, I don’t mean getting nude, sexist pigs. Although I won’t complain about that aspect of Black Book as I watch certain scenes on the DVD over and over again), because I really would like to see her get the spotlight – and the kind of work – she deserves.