Characters from the 2023 film Poor Things.
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Bella Baxter
Played by: Emma Stone
"I am finding being alive fascinating."
A young woman resurrected by the surgeon-scientist Godwin Baxter. As her brain matures, she increasingly desires to find her place in the world.- Adaptation Backstory Change: Bella's own account of the story is excised from the film.
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: Bella is immediately interested in Duncan and declares that she wants to go on an adventure with him (including sexual activity), though she declares in her limited vocabulary that she expects to return and marry Max.
- Ambiguously Bi: In the film's second act, Bella begins working at a brothel and strikes up a friendship with Toinette, another prostitute. The relationship eventually becomes both sexual and romantic, and the end of the movie has Toinette living with the now-married Bella and Max as a part of their family. It's unclear if Bella is attracted to any other women or if her bisexuality is simply part of her exploration of the world, but she clearly loves Toinette and also enjoys being in bed with her.
- Amnesiac Hero: Bella has absolutely no memories of her past life upon being resurrected, acting as an innocent child for most of the film before she matures. When her old husband, Alfie, shows up to reclaim her, he has to describe to her who she was. This is entirely appropriate and strictly not actually amnesia, because Bella has a completely new, transplanted brain, but the effects are much the same.
- Back from the Dead: Victoria Blessington was an aristocratic woman who threw herself into the Thames after becoming pregnant. Godwin uses her unborn infant's brain to bring her body back to life as Bella.
- Brainless Beauty: Early in the film, Max can be forgiving for assuming that Bella is a pretty woman with a developmental disorder — unsurprising, given that she literally has the mind of a child in the body of an adult woman. He and Duncan both fall in love with her despite this. She gets better very quickly and proves herself to be a very fast learner.
- Brutal Honesty: She hardly ever minces her words even after she learns about societal norms.
- The Comically Serious: Bella is far from stiff or humorless, but she still comes across as this due to her consistent deadpan affect. Once she learns how to speak in full sentences, her general tone and demeanor is that of a curious scientist tinkering in the lab, whether she's discovering a tasty new pastry or having sex for the fifth time in a row.
- Cute Monster Girl: Bella is a Flesh Golem made of a dead woman's body and her unborn daughter's brain, but the spookiness of her looks doesn't get any further than her rather stark coloring and some well-concealed scars.
- Driven to Suicide:
- The movie starts with a woman throwing herself off a bridge into a river. We eventually learn that this woman was Victoria Blessington, who committed suicide to escape her abusive aristocrat husband and whose body was upcycled into Bella's with the addition of her unborn child's brain.
- Bella herself (as in, the person now in Victoria Blessington's body) nearly does the same thing off of a parapet in Alexandria after seeing the suffering poor for the first time and learning that they only live like that because of the indifference of the wealthy. Considering Bella is Victoria's daughter in Victoria's body, it's an odd case of Like Mother, Like Daughter.
- Dude Magnet: She ends up catching the attention of several men, for better or for worse, and out of all of them, only Max and Duncan are serious enough love interests for her, with the former being the person who ends up winning her heart.
- Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: She's an unkempt, pale woman, with jet-black hair long enough to hit her in the back of her knees — a visual indicator of her origin involving suicide and resurrection.
- Giant Poofy Sleeves: In keeping with the Victorian-esque setting, Bella has a penchant for dresses and coats with large poofy sleeves, and frequently pairs them with leg-baring skirts and shorts for visual contrast.
- Heroic BSoD: Bella experiences this after Harry shows her abject poverty for the first time in her life. She can only snap out of it by stealing all of Duncan's recently-won casino money and putting them in a box to be given to the poor.
- Hulk Speak: Bella speaks in broken English for good portion of the film, even after she develops a respectable vocabulary. It's not until she takes an interest in reading that her grammar rapidly improves.
- I Hate Past Me: One of the things that apparently bonded Alfie and Victoria (according to Alfie, anyway) was their shared taste for callousness and cruelty. Bella, whose body was formerly Victoria's before being brought back to life with a new brain, is appalled by this notion.
- The Jailbait Wait: A rare example that applies to mental age rather than biological age, but Max eventually resumes his relationship with her, when Belle is already an adult mentally.
- Lovable Sex Maniac: She's an eccentric and inquisitive young woman who develops a positively voracious sex drive after discovering her sexuality. Even the sex-crazed Duncan can't keep up with her.
- Love Martyr: Bella sticks by Duncan for a long time, even though they're an obviously mismatched pair, since she believes he will one day prove his worth and become a better person. She eventually realizes he never will and unceremoniously dumps him in Paris.
- Manchild: After being resurrected, Bella starts off like this, needing to be taught how to walk and behave, as she can initially just imitate animal noises, has Jabba Table Manners and hits Max in the face when Dr. Baxter introduces her to him like an impulsive infant.
- Meaningful Name: Possibly named for Frankenstein author Mary Godwin Shelley's real-life friend Isabella Baxter.
- My Own Grampa: A rare non-time travel related example; Bella was reborn after Victoria's dead body was taken and her brain was replaced with the brain of Victoria's unborn, still-living child, thus technically making Bella her own daughter.
- Nice Girl: While she can be very blunt, Bella is a free-spirited Wide-Eyed Idealist who's kind to everyone she meets provided that they are kind to her in return.
- No Social Skills: At the start of the film, Bella behaves much like a toddler, smashing plates at dinnertime and throwing temper tantrums when she doesn't get her way. She develops from there, and at an "accelerated pace", but it takes her quite some time in order to learn social graces like "not spitting out your food at the table" or "not trying to punch a crying baby". By the end of the film, she has matured to the point where she is merely eccentric (and more than a little blunt).
- Prefers Going Barefoot: The freespirited tabula rasa Bella goes barefoot as often as possible, both indoors and outdoors.
- Rapid Hair Growth: Max notes that Bella's hair grows half an inch a day.note By the end of the film, it's past her knees.
- Really Gets Around: As soon as she discovers her sexuality, Bella becomes absolutely sexually voracious. Upon being whisked away by caddish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn, they have sex often enough to tire out even a notorious horndog like Duncan. Bella eventually spends a stint in Paris as a prostitute where she has sex with many men.
- Scars Are Forever: The initially amnesiac Bella still retains vertical scars on her belly and neck. Toinette correctly clocks the former as a C-section scar, prompting Bella's renewed curiosity in her origins.
- The Shameless: Part of what makes Bella so unique is the fact that she simply does not possess any sense of shame: she is utterly matter-of-fact and unapologetic about her own self, including her sexual proclivities, because she was never taught to be otherwise.
- Single Woman Seeks Good Man: After experiencing various heartbreaks in her journey across the world, including her relationship with Duncan, she finds true love with and marries Max, who is kindhearted and sincerely loves and respects her for who she is.
- Third-Person Person: Bella often refers to herself in the third person as her brain and vocabulary develops. In fact, the habit sticks around for a while, even when she begins reading Emerson.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Bella is raised around cadavers, so she has a warped perception of death in her early days. Upon seeing a frog, her first impulse is to kill it, and she enjoys stabbing corpses in God's morgue. These behaviors get left behind as she becomes more worldly.
- Unkempt Beauty: Bella is less put together than other woman in the Victorian-esque setting with her wild long dark hair, penchant for wearing shorts, and lack of refined manners, but several men that see her are immediately enthralled by her good looks,
- Unusual Euphemism: Bella comes up with a whole bunch, simply by virtue of not yet having the vocabulary to describe what she's doing. Hence, "having sex" becomes "furious jumping".
- Verbal Tic: In the middle stage of her development, Bella has a tendency to use a number of words that all mean the same thing in the same sentence.Bella: There is a world to explore, traverse, circumnavigate...
- Wide-Eyed Idealist: Bella starts out as this, being a true tabula rasa. She remains one by the end of the film, despite the world's best efforts.
- Walking the Earth: Bella escapes from Dr. Baxter to journey around the world for self-discovery purposes.
- Would Hurt a Child: Played for Laughs. She attempts to punch an infant that annoyed her, though it comes more from her not knowing how much of a societal taboo it is than her intentionally crossing the line.
Godwin Baxter
Played by: Willem Dafoe
"My father once told me, "Always carve with compassion." He was a fucking idiot, but it's not bad advice."
Bella's creator and adoptive parent, a gifted surgeon with a major disregard for medical ethics.- Above Good and Evil: Baxter is a Mad Scientist who performs weird surgical operations on animals and human beings out of scientific curiosity, which he clearly believes is more important than ethics. He does have some kind of moral sense, however, unlike his own father, who mutilated him in the name of scientific research.
- Abusive Parents: While Godwin is decidedly not abusive to Bella (despite being a bit overprotective), he's borderline abusive to his second "daughter" Felicity, treating her coldly in an attempt to distance himself emotionally from his newest experiment (though Felicity doesn't seem to regard him as much of a parent anyway). His own father was evidently not only highly abusive, but completely deranged.
- Adaptational Jerkass: Godwin in the books is, generally, a much more moral and emotionally normal character, as opposed to the movie version who tries to supress morality and emotion in order to pursue his scientific interests without worry. One example is that book Godwin also has a menagerie of animals, except they're all perfectly normal. He only ever experiments on two rabbits, swapping their upper and lower halves, but swaps them back again as soon as he realises they dislike it. At one point he is asked by Archie (Max in the film) if he or his father were vivisectionists, which deeply hurts him, leading him to comment that neither he or his father have ever harmed a living being. Film Godwin also never acknowleges that he could have saved baby Bella, and allowed her to have a normal childhood and life.
- Adaptational Nice Guy: The book's Godwin created Bella to be a bride for him who wouldn't care about his hideous appearance or lack of sexual function and was quite controlling to that effect. The film's Godwin had similar ideas when he first created her, but he unexpectedly developed strong paternal feelings for her instead, and ends up a kindly father figure to her to the point of secretly making sure Bella has money when she runs away, because he knows he can't stop her and wants her to be safe while she finds herself.
- Adaptation Relationship Overhaul:
- Godwin and Max's (Archie in the book) relationship is much friendlier in the film, with Godwin personally wanting Max to marry Bella before her encounter with Wedderburn.
- Bella is much more affectionate with him after her return to London as well, though it takes her some time to feel she can trust him again after finding out how she was made and that he and Max made Felicity after her departure.
- In the book Godwin's physical ailments and malformities are seemingly natural, rather than caused by his father's experiments. As a result there is no hint of animosity unlike we see near the end of the film.
- Adaptational Ugliness: Zig-zagged. Godwin is alarming-looking to the general public in both the book and movie, but in the book he’s simply ”ogreish” and mundanely unattractive. The movie iteration still recognizably has Willem Dafoe’s craggily handsome features, but at the same time his face looks as though it’s been built out of pieces of several other faces that don’t fit together properly, leading his own students to call him a monster.
- In the book, it's revealed that Godwin was, in reality, young and good-looking, though he was in Bella/Victoria's words "a big man with sad eyes." Bella/Victoria fell deeply in love with him after he talked her out of getting a clitoridectomy and started teaching her medicine while helping her escape from her awful first husband, but he gently turned her down because he was born with congenital syphilis from his father's infection with it (though it didn't affect his mother) and didn't want to give it to her, nor to make her watch him gradually go insane and lose function from it. He died of euthanasia with his mother's help in a weeping Bella/Victoria's arms, and she never quite got over him. Archie, Max's counterpart, wrote him as a pathetically ugly older man to cope with this.
- Bizarre Human Biology: Due to his father's tampering, he doesn't have a functional gastrointestinal tract. He has to eat while hooked up to some complicated machinery full of bubbling liquid, and excretes via bubbles that he burps out.
- The Grotesque: Baxter looks hideous, and he gets up to some pretty amoral experiments, but he's a pretty soft-hearted and loving guy under that scary face.
- Hilariously Abusive Childhood: He talks about the horrific abuse his father subjected him to as if they were lighthearted childhood memories as opposed to unspeakable cruelties. Max is clearly appalled by it, and the contrast between their reactions makes the joke.
- Maker of Monsters: Baxter is a low-key monster-maker, being limited to stitching body parts of different small animals together and performing the occasional human brain transplant — and his two human creations are both pretty, entirely normal-looking young women with minimal scarring.
- Meaningful Name: Dr. Godwin Baxter is frequently called "God" for short, primarily by Bella — appropriately for someone who "plays God" with his creations, and who acts as a powerful parental figure to her. "Godwin" was also Mary Shelley's maiden name — in fact, it was still her last name when she wrote Frankenstein— and one of the formative experiences of young Mary Godwin's life was a stay in the household of the philosopher William Baxter, who happened to have a daughter named Isabella.
- Parental Incest: Dr. Baxter actually inverts this trope. Instead of being a father who develops perverse feelings for his child, he created Bella in the first place intending for her to be his mistress and not feeling particularly parental toward her. But Baxter's total sexual incapacity (thanks to his father's experiments on him) pushed the idea out of his head, and then strong paternal feelings followed. By the time we see their relationship, Dr. Baxter reads Bella bedtime stories and snuggles with her without the slightest hint of impropriety.
- Parental Substitute: Dr. Baxter takes care of Bella after resurrecting her, but is overly protective to the point of not wanting her to venture outside — though given her initial state of total inexperience, he has some justification for this, and he eventually drops this attitude completely when she proves stubbornly determined to experience the world.
- Scary Stitches: Dr. Baxter is a Mix-and-Match Man, with a grotesquely deformed face that seems to be made of parts of other unfitting faces stitched together thanks to his father's experimentation.
- Your Days Are Numbered: While Bella is missing, Baxter gets weaker and discovers that he's growing a tumor in his belly. Thankfully he manages to live long enough to be reunited with her and pass away in peace with her and Max by his side.
Max McCandles
Played by: Ramy Youssef
"Tell me, where did she come from?"
Godwin's student and protege. He monitors Bella's progress and develops feelings for her.- Adaptational Name Change: Archibald McCandles is renamed Max in the film.
- Adaptational Nice Guy: Max is significantly more able to admit to having been selfish and possessive (in his own understated way) of Bella before she was even fully developed than his book counterpart Archibald. In the book, the account of Bella's life is written by Archibald and is outright said to be a mixture of fabrications, lurid pornography, sexual fantasies, marital insecurities, and Frankenstein fanfiction — which Bella refutes in her own papers as the product of her husband's fevered and pathetic imagination. Archibald's account is presented as the main story instead of the story within the story in the film and is never implied to be a work of fiction within the confines of the narrative, and the world the film is set in is far more fantastical than the world of the book in order to justify this. Perhaps most notably, Archibald's bout of insane, hair-tearing jealousy after learning Bella has slept with other men is grafted directly onto Duncan Wedderburn, while Max tells Bella she's allowed to do as she wishes with her body.
- Apologetic Attacker: While visiting Duncan at the psychiatric ward to try to get Bella's location, Max has to fend him off numerous times, leading to a few physical scuffles. Being the Nice Guy he is, he apologizes for attacking Duncan and admits he does not want to, but will still defend himself if he needs to.
- Audience Surrogate: In the early stages of the film, Max shares the audience's introduction to Godwin and Bella, and asks some of the questions that the audience would want answered. He drops out of this role when Bella runs off with Wedderburn, by which time the basics of the situation have been largely established.
- Ascended Fanboy: Max starts out as the only medical student who verbally expresses his admiration for the Baxters' surgical, er, talents. He not only becomes Godwin Baxter's assistant, but eventually his companion and adoptive son-in-law.
- Extreme Doormat: He usually goes along with Godwin's less-than-ethical demands, though he does start objecting increasingly often after Bella leaves.
- First Love: While Bella takes on several lovers and has sex with many men, Max is the first person she loved and is ultimately who she ends up marrying.
- Grew a Spine: It's subtle, but he becomes more willing to stand up and push back against Godwin after Bella leaves, though he does still remain a bit of a pushover.
- Nice Guy: Max is practical, affable and supportive of Bella, which is why she is still amenable to marrying him even after all her adventures. He is a bit of a pushover, though, being unable to really object to Godwin's less ethical ambitions.
- Not So Above It All: Despite being sane compared to the rest of the characters, he was still willing to form a contract in which he married someone who was still a child mentally, and make her a prisoner. He eventually realized that what he did was wrong.
- Only Sane Man: In a household consisting of a Mad Scientist, his Creepy Housekeeper, and a Womanchild with No Social Skills, Max is an island of relative normality — although he is rather passive about it.
Duncan Wedderburn
Played by: Mark Ruffalo
"You, like me, are a creature of freedom in the moment."
A debauched lawyer initially hired to oversee the marriage of Max and Bella. He promises Bella adventure and runs off with her, but later tires of her growing independence and strong will.- Adaptation Expansion: In the film, Wedderburn is present at the wedding between Max and Bella. In the novel, his story more or less ends after he's sent back home.
- Adaptational Jerkass: In the nested narrative of the book, it turns out Archibald — the far less likeable book counterpart to Max — wrote Duncan as an awful cad partially to externalize his own jealousy and possessiveness of Bella/Victoria onto a Hate Sink who couldn't defend himself. Victoria did run off with Duncan after Godwin's death, and Duncan did end up institutionalized, but Victoria remained fond enough of him to visit him and enjoyed their conversations. She writes sadly and affectionately of having played with Duncan until he broke, suggesting he might not have been too bad of a guy during their romance, and may have simply been mentally ill.
- Addled Addict: Being around Bella proves to be very stressful for him, so Duncan takes to gambling and alcohol to cope. He spends most of the second act on the cruise either gambling at the casino or drunkenly passed out.
- Age-Gap Romance: It's never commented upon, but Duncan is visibly a good deal older than Bella, being in his middle age while she seems to be in her early thirties at most. Their actors Mark Ruffalo and Emma Stone share a twenty-year age gap between them.
- Ambiguously Bi: When visited by Max McCandles, Bella's fiancé, in the poorhouse, Duncan vows to "save him from her" before attempting to either kiss Max, lick his face, or both.
- Amoral Attorney: Duncan Wedderburn is a lawyer who helps Bella escape in order to fulfill her wishes of exploring the world, but has selfish ulterior motives beneath his charming exterior.
- Asshole Victim: Duncan is subject to a lot of humiliation over the course of the film, but given how much of a reckless, controlling sleazebag he is, it's hard to say he doesn't deserve it.
- Butt-Monkey: Duncan mixes his superficially charming exterior with a pathetic inner nature, and gets more and more humiliated as the film goes on. Given the kind of person he is, it's hard to say that he's not deserving of it.
- The Cat Came Back: He tries to get back with Bella in Paris even after wanting to split up from her and telling her harshly off after she gets them stranded in the city. Then, when Bella gets back home he comes back one more time to try and ruin her happiness by bringing Alfie with him.
- Composite Character: In the novel, nearly every male character (including the fictional version of Dr. Baxter and Archie, Max's counterpart) is driven to pathetic, possessive madness by Bella's charms and promiscuity. In the film, that's all given solely to Duncan, to further embroider on the fall from grace he already had in the book and to accommodate Baxter and Max's more sympathetic and empathetic characterizations. Archie's tearing out his own hair when he thinks of Bella with other men is given directly to Duncan, while Max is respectful of Bella's sexual autonomy.
- Control Freak: Duncan falls in love with and agrees to take Bella with him because he assumes that she will be easy to control due to her naivete and lack of knowledge of how the world works. When Bella starts to become more mature and independent, he becomes utterly frustrated because he can no longer tell her what to do, eventually leading to a Sanity Slippage that gets him committed to an asylum after she breaks up with him.
- Crazy Jealous Guy: Duncan is extremely possessive of Bella and tries to physically assault a man for repeatedly winking at her and later extends this to her friends, attempting to throw Martha overboard for supposedly corrupting her. Even after he has fully tired of her, he still displays this possessiveness, flying into a rage-induced breakdown after he learns that Bella has become a prostitute and tracking down Alfie to try and stop her wedding to Max.
- Establishing Character Moment: Godwin notes that the contract Duncan drew up contains several spelling errors, something Duncan brushes off without embarrassment, showing that Duncan is foolish and irresponsible. After Duncan goes off to see Bella under the guise of needing to use the bathroom, he ends up tripping while going up the stairs, establishing that he is going to be subject to quite a bit of humiliation.
- Everyone Has Standards:
- He admits that he has no use for polite society and finds the whole concept to be rather stupid, agreeing with Harry when he voices a similar opinion, not that it stops him from trying to get Bella to conform to said polite society.
- He also seems to be genuinely apologetic when Max informs him that Godwin has cancer after he accuses him of being demonic and has the decency to shut up about it afterwards.
- Hypocrite:
- Even though his relationship with Bella was just an affair that would only last a couple of months before he left her (at least initially), he is upset that Bella also considered it an affair, and that she does not plan to cancel her engagement to Max to marry him. He actually acknowledges himself that he's become a "succubus of a lover" despite being annoyed at them prior, but it's not enough for him to actually change his behavior.
- As brought up by Mark Ruffalo in interviews, Duncan fancies himself as being a libertine who believes in free love—that is, unless a woman (in this case, Bella) engages in that free love. This is best shown in his possessive nature towards her and his complete mental breakdown when she tells him that she has become a prostitute.
- Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: What he eventually devolves into. Duncan's attempts at genuine villainy are extremely non-threatening. He meekly backs down after threatening to throw Bella off a boat, gets his ass completely kicked when he genuinely does try and throw Cool Old Lady Martha off as well, and isn't even taken seriously by Max. The only real damage he does is paving the way for the story's real villain, Alfie Blessington, at which point Duncan vanishes from the plot.
- Laughably Evil: Duncan might be a selfish, controlling jerk who becomes even worse as he goes off the rails, but he's such a pathetic Manchild that it's hard not to laugh at him as he faces a mounting Humiliation Conga.
- Madness Makeover: Duncan ends up dirtier and more disheveled the longer he spends on the receiving end of Bella's antics. Played for laughs when he shows up later with his previously thick and curly hair now flattened into a thinning, straightened-out combover that he screams at Bella not to look at.
- Manchild: Despite being a middle-aged man, Duncan behaves in petulant, immature ways and frequently throws temper tantrums.
- Riches to Rags: Duncan goes from wealthy lawyer who can afford to gallivant across Europe to a miserable, jealous wreck in a poorhouse after Bella takes all his money and they wind up stranded in Paris — and unlike her, he never finds the clearheadedness to change his fortunes.
- Sanity Slippage: Duncan Wedderburn's inability to cope with Bella's naivety and total lack of sexual inhibitions end up first shattering his suave persona, then turning him into a nervous wreck who accuses Bella of being a demon sent to destroy him and Dr. Baxter of being an evil sorcerer. He ends up doing a stint in an asylum, though he gets out through unknown means later on.
- Sex God: He claims to be the best lay Bella will ever have. During her stint as a prostitute, Bella muses that this wasn't so unfounded a claim, despite all of Duncan's other flaws.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Duncan disappears from the narrative after he breaks up Bella and Max's wedding with the arrival of Alfie Blessington, Bella's husband from her previous life as Victoria.
Martha von Kurtzroc
Played by: Hanna Schygulla
"Harry, you wretch, [philosophy] is integral. People and society can be improved."
A wealthy older woman who befriends Bella on a cruise ship.- Cool Old Lady: A go-with-the-flow older woman who speaks about her sex life (or lack thereof) with utter frankness, nurtures Bella's growing intelligence, and doesn't hesitate to smack Duncan in the face with a cane for his meddling.
- Intergenerational Friendship: Martha is good friends with Harry Astley and immediately takes a shine to Bella as well, and they're both decades younger than her.
- Never Mess with Granny: As mentioned below, when Duncan tries to throw her over the side of the boat, she whacks him in the face with her cane once she's had enough of his antics.
- Not Afraid to Die: When a drunk Duncan attempts to throw her off the boat, she shows no signs of being worried and even admits to be rather welcoming of death. Though that might have just been sarcasm on her part.
- Old People are Nonsexual: She's an old woman who admits to the younger Bella that she hasn't gotten laid in twenty years, to the latter's horror. Bella is somewhat comforted by how Martha still masturbates, at least.'Martha: As the years pass what is between my ears is my main concern, that between my legs less so.
Harry Astley
Played by: Jerrod Carmichael
"Do you want to see what the world is really like?"
Martha's cynical companion.- Above the Influence: Harry is only interested in Bella's shamelessness and openness in a non-sexual, non-romantic way, because he's a Knight in Sour Armor who believes Humans Are the Real Monsters and feels that she needs to see what the world is really like. Despite his prominence on the poster alongside her love interests and father, he's the only man in her life whose interactions with her would probably be more or less the same if she were a naive young man instead.
- Adaptation Backstory Change: In the novel, Harry is an Englishman working for a London-based firm. Here, his background is not expanded upon and Jerrod Carmicheal speaks with his natural American accent.
- The Cynic: Harry is an affirmed cynic (as Martha explicitly notes), and shows Bella a scene of abject poverty in Alexandria in order to disabuse her of her idealism — an act for which he later apologizes. Ultimately remaining an optimist, Bella summarizes to him in their last conversation that he is "a broken little boy who cannot bear the pain of the world", Harry reflecting this is largely true.
- Everyone Has Standards: Harry is an avowed cynic who takes Bella to Alexandria in order to break her spirit, but after Bella becomes incredibly horrified by the extreme poverty she sees, he's clearly concerned about her, stops her from killing herself, and does his best to calm her down. He later acknowledges that what he did was cruel and apologizes.
- Sharp-Dressed Man: Cruise ship passenger Harry is always dressed in a well-tailored suit, and accessorizes stylishly as well.
Madame Swiney
Played by: Kathryn Hunter
"A woman plotting her course to freedom. How delightful."
A woman who runs a Parisian brothel; she takes Bella on as one of her 'girls.'- Character Tics: She has a penchant for biting things she finds pretty and her teeth land on Bella's body multiple times throughout the film.
- Depraved Bisexual: Madame Swiney appears to be a downplayed example of this trope. She offers Bella useful life advice, but she also shows as much sense of entitlement towards Bella's body as Wedderburn does.
- Distaff Counterpart: In a meta sense. While most of the movie is about Bella learning to assert and define herself despite the efforts of the men around her, whether those efforts are well-intentioned (Dr. Baxter's overprotectiveness, Max's initial passive possessiveness, Harry's need to shatter Bella's illusions about the world) or purely selfish (Wedderburn's petulant chauvinism, Alfie's cruelty), Madame Swiney is an illustration to her that not all women have women's better interests at heart, either — though Bella learns from her, too.
- Miss Kitty: Madame Swiney is an old woman who runs a Parisian brothel and eventually hires Bella as a prostitute.
- Villain Has a Point: Madame Swiney is a sinister, manipulative figure, but her advice about the benefits of "experiencing everything in life, not only the good" clearly resonates with Bella.
Toinette
Played by: Suzy Bemba
"Make it better. A better world."
A fellow prostitute at Madame Swiney's.- Chummy Commies: Toinette identifies as a socialist (though not, strictly speaking, as a communist), and her ideology apparently sparks enough of an interest in Bella that they go to at least one socialist meeting together. They also become friends and lovers.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: The end of the movie shows that she's joined Bella and Max as part of a Family of Choice, helping to raise Felicity and generally being treated as a third member of their marriage.
- Hooker with a Heart of Gold: After Bella joins the brothel, Toinette serves as a source of support and advice; in turn, as Bella improves her station in life, so does Toinette.
- Mirror Character: To Harry Astley. Both are people of color, but Toinette despite her situation supports the socialist cause and works to improve her life after being inspired by Bella's ideals of change, whereas Astley is a free wealthy man but a resigned Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids! cynic.
- Twofer Token Minority: She's a Black queer woman.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Averted—though she disappears once Bella returns to London, at the end of the film, Toinette is shown living with the now-married Bella and Max as a valued member of their family, and it's implied that she and Bella have continued their sexual relationship as well.
Felicity
Played by: Margaret Qualley
"Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam."
Another woman resurrected by Godwin and Max after Bella's departure.- Ambiguous Situation: It's not clear if Felicity still has her own brain after being resurrected or, like Bella, had a fetus's working brain implanted inside her. The fact that Felicity takes much longer to develop than Bella seems to point to the former, but it's never stated.
- Brainless Beauty: Despite being created by the same process as Bella (as far as we know — we're never actually told if another brain transplant was involved) and looking like a fair-faced young woman, Felicity ends up coming across more as actually unintelligent, rather than simply passing through the stages of childhood in an adult body the way Bella did. While Bella initially possesses a childlike clumsiness while learning new words, for example, Felicity tends to do things like staring into space while making repetitive motions and repeating words with no understanding. She may be getting better by the end of the movie, when Bella is raising her as a little sister.
- From the Mouths of Babes: As Prim refers to Bella as "the whore", Felicity does too — albeit without any malice.
- Replacement Goldfish: After Bella leaves Godwin and Max to go travel with Duncan, the two attempt to recreate the "experiment" with a new subject, who they name Felicity. Max even lampshades it when Bella asks why they did it again with a hapless "we missed you." Felicity doesn't develop nearly as quickly as Bella, although the end of the film shows that she's gradually improving.
Mrs Prim
Played by: Vicki Pepperdine
Godwin's devoted housekeeper and assistant.
- Creepy Housekeeper: A stern woman who picks up after her Mad Scientist boss and his bizarre creations without batting an eye.
- Pet the Dog: She seems to take a liking to Felicity, being considerably kinder and more nurturing to her than she ever was to Bella.
Alfie Blessington (Unmarked Spoilers)
Played by: Christopher Abbott
The husband of Bella's 'past life' Victoria Blessington, who shows up to reclaim Bella after learning of her existence.
- Asshole Victim: Having one's brain swapped with that of a goat would be an undeniably horrifying fate, but considering how Alfie shut Bella in his house and attempted to perform female genital mutilation on her, the audience doesn't feel too bad when it happens to him.
- Bad Boss: He takes great cheer in tormenting his servants, such as by calling in a maid to bring in hot soup and then startling her so she spills the soup over herself. Tellingly, the first thing he tells Bella upon arriving at the estate is that he "fears an uprising." In addition, there is strong implication that in his career as a General he was a sadist to his men.
- Beyond Redemption: For all her idealism and unwavering belief that people can be improved and healed of certain negative "aspects," Alfie's gratuitous cruelty proves too much for her. So she "improves" him by swapping his brain for a goat's, and everyone is better off.
- Card-Carrying Villain: He merely chuckles when Bella surmises that he and Victoria fell in love with each other over their mutual love of casual cruelty.
- Composite Character: His personality in the film is combined with aspects of Bella's recollection of her father from the novel.
- Faux Affably Evil: He is consistently soft-spoken and gentle in the way he speaks, which belies his casual cruelty and desire to control his wife.
- Hate Sink: Blessington has no redeeming qualities whatsoever: he's abusive to his servants, imprisons Bella in her home, and makes it clear that he plans to subject her to genital mutilation as a further means of controlling her. And unlike Duncan, who's more of a Lovable Rogue, Blessington's scenes are played entirely without comedy — nothing he does is funny, just cruel. As such, no tears are shed when he's Bella's first "experiment" in mind-swapping, and his fate to live with a goat's brain in his body feels justified.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: After Bella chucks the sedative he tried to force onto her back in his face, he ends up accidentally shooting himself with the very gun he used to threaten Bella and the staff.
- Ironic Name: A controlling, abusive man with the surname Blessington.
- Marital Rape License: Implicitly practiced one with Victoria (should we chose to believe he's lying about Victoria's moral character, it got to the point she chose to kill herself with her unborn child rather than live with Alfie), and he makes it he has no regard for Bella's consent when he decides to father a new heir.
- Plot-Irrelevant Villain: Downplayed. Alfie's presence in the film is foreshadowed early on in the form of the unanswered question of why Victoria was Driven to Suicide, and he serves as Victoria's final obstacle before her happy ending, but he only appears in the final thirty minutes of the movie when every other loose end has been wrapped up. In the end, Victoria admits he was just "a part of someone else's story."
