Ridley Scott Admits a Major Kingdom of Heaven Blunder — and Apologizes to Eva Green

Ridley Scott admits he cut the heart out of Eva Green's character in Kingdom of Heaven, and honestly, you can see why she never got over it. The theatrical version turned Sibylla of Jerusalem into a side quest for Orlando Bloom's Balian. The Director's Cut? Whole different story. It gives Green a tragic, brutal arc that explains her choices and actually makes the movie better.

What Scott cut — and why it mattered

Scott told IndieWire there was a 17-minute sequence built around Sibylla that he removed for time. It did not go over well with his star — or her family.

"[Eva Green] never forgave me for cutting that 17 minutes. Her mother shouted at me. 'How can you do this?' I said, 'I know, I'm sorry!'"

That missing chunk is the difference between Sibylla reading as a flat love interest and a fully realized figure carrying impossible weight. If you only saw the theatrical cut, you genuinely watched a different character.

The two versions, side by side

• Theatrical cut: King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem (played under a mask by Edward Norton) is dying of leprosy. Sibylla, stuck in a miserable marriage to Guy de Lusignan, falls for Balian. The king floats a plan to make Balian the next ruler by pairing him with Sibylla; Balian refuses. Later, after the siege and all the carnage, Sibylla gives up the crown and leaves with Balian. She mostly functions as a romantic subplot, and then it just... fades out. Balian goes back to being a blacksmith.
• Director's Cut: We meet Sibylla's young son, Baldwin V — the actual heir. Sibylla discovers he has leprosy too, first hinted at when he doesn’t feel hot wax on his skin. Once the diagnosis is confirmed, she faces a horrifying choice: let her child suffer as her brother did, or spare him. She quietly poisons him as he sleeps in her arms. It's devastating, and it recontextualizes everything she does afterward, including the power plays around her and the choices that looked arbitrary in the theatrical version.

Scott, in hindsight

On the ReelBlend podcast, Scott flat-out said he regrets listening to people who told him the movie was too long and chopping that storyline out.

"To my regret, I removed the 17 minutes because people were saying the film's long... how wrong they were. You have to watch that version."

He is not wrong. The Director's Cut turns Sibylla into an actual protagonist of her own thread, not just Balian's motivation.

Eva Green on playing Sibylla

Green has described the theatrical Sibylla as pretty undefined on screen — by design, given what got cut. She was cast a week before cameras rolled, which is wild for a role this central, and she built the character off the script instead of historical research because there wasn't much time. She also looked back on Sibylla's relationship with Guy and the fallout from refusing the crown, noting how little of that complexity made it into theaters.

About Scott, she has been openly admiring: calm, precise, under pressure, and very British about it all. In another interview, she explained that the shorter cut leaned into the film's broader political axis — the Christian-Muslim tensions — and, as a result, skewed more toward the male characters. Her take on the longer version is simple: the script was huge, compromises were made, but the alternate cut exists and it makes Sibylla far more layered. She was relieved it didn't get buried.

The bigger picture

The Director's Cut doesn't just add scenes; it fixes motivations. It shows why Sibylla doesn't simply waltz off with Balian and hand the city to Guy as if nothing else is happening. There are stakes we never see in the shorter version — an heir, an illness, a mother making an unthinkable choice — and once you know that, her arc actually lands.

Seen both cuts? Did the full version finally do right by Green's character? Drop your take in the comments. And if you want to compare for yourself, Kingdom of Heaven is streaming on STARZ (via Prime Video).