Talia’s death near the end of The Dark Knight Rises didn’t go off with a bang … so much as a literal whimper as she nodded off into eternal slumber. This isn’t something lost on star Marion Cotillard, who shared how, four years later, she’s still embarrassed that that’s how her character went down.
In an interview with French publication Allocine, Cotillard went into detail about some of her more famous performances of the past, including Inception and La Vie en rose. However, when it came to her turn as Talia al Ghul in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, only one thing came to mind: how terribly she was killed off.
The character might’ve been unique, interesting, and very well-acted, but Cotillard’s turn as Talia has gone down as having one of the silliest character death scenes of the 21st century. It was the source of a meme for years, even getting its own designated Tumblr page of people “dying” like Cotillard.
Cotillard revealed that she doesn’t really blame anyone for what happened, but she’s still mortified that Christopher Nolan and crew decided to use that version of the scene, when there were likely dozens of others to choose from.
“Sometimes there are failures, and when you see this on screen, you’re thinking: Why? Why did they keep that take?” Cotillard said, translated from French. “It was tough to be identified just with this scene. When I’m doing the best I can to find the authenticity in every character that I’m playing, it’s tough to be known just for this scene.”
Even though Cotillard thinks people overreacted to that scene, she hasn’t lost her sense of humor about the whole situation. In 2015, she performed a rap battle on the French miniseries Casting, in which her co-star used the Batman death as a final knockout punch, to which she simply replied, “That sucks.” To be fair, though, it didn’t suck as much as her death scene in The Dark Knight Rises.
