Smart, sexy and strong, Olga Kurylenko is a lot like her Quantum of Solace character
Ukrainian beauty Olga Kurylenko puts a new face on the role of Bond Girl, and what a face it is! Her Quantum of Solace character Camille is nobody’s plaything, not even OO7’s.
Whoever decided women should be called “the weaker sex” never met Olga Kurylenko.
The Ukrainian-born beauty is smart, outspoken and very determined — just the characteristics that also define the newest Bond Girl.
As Camille in Quantum of Solace, Kurylenko gets to play a different sort of femme fatale. She isn’t anybody’s plaything, and the biggest passion she shares with James Bond is their mutual lust for revenge. The secret agent meets his match.
“She’s not just hanging out with him. She doesn’t need Bond to exist,” says Kurylenko of her Quantum of Solace character. “She’s got her own story, her own agenda and her own life.”
That agenda is to avenge the killings of her family.
Quantum Of Solace opens Friday, which also happens to be Kurylenko’s 29th birthday. During a recent promotional stop, she talked about how hard she worked to get the role of Camille. And, no, she had no reservations about being a Bond Girl.
“If I didn’t want the job, I wouldn’t have gone through the casting process,” she says. “If I don’t want to do something, believe me, I’m not going to do it. I worked so hard to get this. A lot of people wanted the part.”
She was told she’d landed the role on Christmas Eve. “And when they told me I got the role, I was like, ‘Yes!’ ”
Kurylenko was raised by her mother and grandmother in Berdyansk, and they were quite poor. Hers is a true rags-to-riches story, although it certainly doesn’t involve intellectual poverty in any way. Kurylenko’s mother was a teacher and her grandmother a doctor, and the former model becomes animated when speaking about them.
“A teacher and a doctor — the two most important professions in the world,” she says. “They were educated and very intelligent, and that’s all good, but when you cannot eat ...” She shrugs. She explains that her grandmother is dead now, and pauses for a second to regain her composure.
Kurylenko was 13 when she and her mother took a trip to Moscow, where an agent who saw her step off the subway immediately approached her with modelling work. By age 17 she was living and working in Paris. At 18 she was a major success story, appearing on such magazine covers as Glamour, Elle and Marie Claire. She was also the face of various cosmetic and fashion lines.
Kurylenko studied acting while earning a living as a model. Her feature-film debut came in 2005 with L’Annulaire. She won roles in Paris, je t’aime, Le Serpent and Hitman (which was her first English-speaking role), and she has roles in Max Payne — in theatres now — and the upcoming Tyranny. Scripts come to her in French and English.
Since her appearance is so extraordinary, Kurylenko is more or less accustomed to being mistaken for just another pretty face. That doesn’t mean she likes it.
The actress, who speaks four languages, says she sometimes thinks intelligence might be wasted in this day and age.
“The world is quite superficial, all about looks and appearance, and nobody cares about what’s on the inside,” she laments.
Speaking of her own physical appearance, she says, with a touch of melancholy, “This is just an envelope. The people who are close to me know who I am. If others want to be negative, they will.”
Asked if she’s worried about the downside of the celebrity that is bound to come with a Bond Girl role, Kurylenko says, “I just want to keep working. Maybe it will be different when the movie is released, but for now I’m back in Paris and I don’t think anybody recognizes me.”
She drops her chin, letting her hair cover most of her face, to show how she can be incognito in a second.
“For now, it’s totally cool. Of course, if you dress up all covered in sparkles and big high heels and everything,” she says, laughing, “yes, you will attract attention!”
In the future, Kurylenko says she hopes to be offered deeper roles.
“Different movies are made for different reasons. Some are to show the truth, or to give a lesson, and to make people think and learn, and those are the movies I want to watch — and the ones I want to be in.”
But she doesn’t just read scripts, she says — she also reads a lot of biographies of famous people, “because their paths are always so interesting. I love those things.
“The one thing all these people seem to believe, and maybe it’s naive of me to believe it, is that if you put out positive energy, it all comes back to you. They make me dream that miracles really do happen.”
