Netflix’s Resident Evil villains feel more monstrous than in the movies

Resident Evil’s world is essentially a simple one. You have both your good and bad people. The latter come in the form either of horrifying creatures like spiders or zombies, as well as the capitalist monsters of the Umbrella Corporation.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Resident Evil season 1.]

Though Netflix’s Resident Evil series takes all it can get from the Resident Evil universe — with everything and Anything being taken as canon gospel — the actresses who play two of the show’s most nefarious characters are glad their roles feel enigmatic in their antagonism.

“I mean, ‘misunderstood’ means complex [for characters], right?” Adeline Rudolph, who plays grown-up Billie Wesker, tells Polygon. “If you’d ask Siena [Agudong], young Billie […] it’s a completely different show, right?”

Her older Billie was the one who captured the promise of a TV show that could bring the Resident Evil franchise to its zenith. At the end she accepted Billie as a character with nuance, but one focus on the world.

“I think for older Billie, it’s absolutely a story of heartbreak, and pain, and trauma. Of survival. And then choosing a path of how she feels like she can survive the best in this future world,” Rudolph says. “She’s very one-sided with [how she sees the future] because she’s gone through so much that she now believes she has the ultimate answer to how we’re going to move forward. Because everything else has been destruction in her life.”

Though she comes from a very different standing in the story, Paola Núñez feels the same about her character, Evelyn, who’s the villainous, pore-free face of the Umbrella Corporation’s reckless greed in the 2022 timeline.

Photo: Marcos Cruz/Netflix

“I think the story of Evelyn is the corporate world, and how to succeed in the corporate world and how to be the best — she wants to be the best, and she wants to be known, she wants to be respected in the world,” Núñez says.

Though her plot line is one that speaks to the ravenous irresponsibility of Umbrella’s entire aim, it also speaks to a world that was desperate for a cure far before zombies became the biggest problem. Evelyn’s Joy antidepressant Evelyn wants to bring to market too soon. It is her idea, an attempt to stop bioweaponry, instead harnessing the evil genius of this technology to cure depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other disorders. OCD is one of the most difficult mental illnesses to manage. But, there’s no magic bullet for it.

While Big Pharma has always been a key part of the Umbrella Corporation’s whole thing, Netflix’s Resident Evil doesn’t approach Umbrella as bad simply because they’re engaging in shady practices; rather, the whole system behind the enterprise seems rotten, even when they’re trying to do the right thing. Evelyn and Billie are both examples of the system’s ability to encourage people to continue perpetuating it.

“[Evelyn]She believes she has the power to change the world. She’s just not thinking about the consequences, of course,” Núñez says. “So her ego is so big that she forgets or she distances herself from other people in a way that she loses all empathy and she makes the wrong choices.”

Some people make bad decisions, but not all are affected by the T-virus that causes a massive zombie epidemic. This virus can turn six billion people into flesh-eating beasts. However, there are ways to mitigate the dangers. Resident Evil there’s room for the possibility that not all mistakes are borne out of a desire to do (wait for it) evil.

Joshua Rivera also contributed additional reporting.